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WORKING WITH THE HANDS 



OTHER BOOKS 

BY 

THE SAME AUTHOR 

CHARACTER BUILDING 
UP FROM SLAVERY 







z 



o 



< 



WORKING 
WITH THE HANDS 



BEING A SEQUEL TO "UP FROM SLAVERY 
COVERING THE AUTHOR'S 
EXPERIENCES IN INDUSTRIAL 
TRAINING AT TUSKEGEE 



By 

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON 

Illuitrated from photographs by Frances 'Benjamin Johnston 




NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1904 






LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two CoDles Received 
MAY 10 1904 
Ceoyrleht Entry 

CLAS^ Ct XXd. No. 

jr t i= / »r 

COPY B 



Copyright, 1904, by 
Doubleday, Page & Company 

Published, May, 1904 




PREFACE 

For several years I have been receiving requests, 
from many parts of the United States, and from for- 
eign countries as well, for some detailed information 
concerning the value of industrial training and the 
methods employed to develop it. This little volume 
is the result, in part, of an attempt to answer these 
queries. Two proven facts need emphasis here : 

First: Mere hand training, without thorough 
moral, religious, and mental education, counts for 
very little. The hands, the head, and the heart 
tosrether, as the essential elements of educational 
need, should be so correlated that one may be made 
to help the others. At the Tuskegee Institute we 
find constantly that we can make our industrial 
work assist in the academic training, and vice versa. 

Second: The effort to make an industry pay its 
way should not be made the aim of first importance. 
The teaching should be most emphasised. Our 
policy at Tuskegee is to make an industry pay its 
way if possible, but at the same time not to sacrifice 
the training to mere economic gain. Those who 
undertake such endeavour with the expectation of 
getting much money out of an industry, will find 
themselves disappointed, unless they realise that 

v 



vi PREFACE 

the institution must be, all the time, working upon 
raw material. At Tuskegee, for example, when a 
student is trained to the point of efficiency where he 
can construct a first-class wagon, we do not keep 
him there to build more vehicles, but send him out 
into the world to exert his trained influence and 
capabilities in lifting others to his level, and we 
begin our work with the raw material all over again. 
I shall be more than repaid if these chapters will 
serve the purpose of helping forward the cause of 
education, even though their aid be remote and 
indirect. 



CONTENTS 



I. Moral Values of Hand Work 

II. Training for Conditions . 

III. A Battle Against Prejudice 

IV. Making Education Pay Its Way 
V. Building Up a System 

VI. Welding Theory and Practice 

VII. Head and Hands Together 

VIII. Lessons in Home-Making . 

IX. Outdoor Work for Women 

X. Helping the Mothers 

XI. The Tillers of the Ground 

XII. Pleasure and Profit of Work in th 
Soil .... 

XIII. On the Experimental Farm 

XIV. The Eagerness for Learning 
XV. The Value of Small Things 

XVI. Religious Influences at Tuskegee 

XVII. Some Tangible Results . 

XVIII. Spreading the Tuskegee Spirit 

XIX. Negro Education Not a Failure 



15 
31 
43 
55 
67 
82 

98 

107 
119 

135 

151 
163 

173 
181 

192 

200 

219 

231 



vn 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



]\Ir. Washins^ton in his office at Tuskegee 



Frontispiece 
FACING PAGE 



Breaking up new ground with an eight-ox team 
Cutting sugar-cane on the School's farm . 
Grinding sugar-cane at the School's sugar-mill 
The repair shop ..... 
Road-building by Tuskegee students 
Building a new dormitory 
DisfSfing foundation for a new building on the 

Institute grounds .... 
At work in the School's brick-yard . 
Shoe-shop — making and repairing . 
Mattress-making . . . . • 

Basket-making ..... 
In the School's sawmill .... 
In the machine-shop .... 
Students at w-ork in the School's foundry 
Class in mechanical drawing 
The blacksmith shop .... 
Students framing the roof of a large building 
Wood-turning machinery 
Learning dressmaking .... 
Barrel furniture ..... 
An out-of-door class in laundr}^ work . 

ix 



i6 
26 

32 
42/ 

50 
56 

58' 
62 
66 
68' 

70 

72 

74 
76 

78 
80 

84 

90 
100 
102 
106 



X LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

Home-made furniture . . . . .130 

" When at Tuskegee I find a way, by rising early 

in the morning, to spend half an hour in my 

garden or with the live stock " . . .154 

Hogs as object-lessons . . . . .156 

"Teach the child something about real country 

life" . . . . , . .160 

Cultivating a patch of cassava on the agricultural 

experiment plot . . . . .164 

The tailor shop . . . . . .176 

The paint shop . . . , . .190 

A furniture and repair shop at Snow Hill , 222 

A sewing-class at Snow Hill . . . .224 

Typesetting — printing office . . . .234 



WORKING WITH THE HANDS 



« « 









WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

CHAPTER I 
Moral Values of Hand Work 

THE worth of work with the hands as an up- 
Hfting power in real education was first 
brought home to me with striking emphasis 
when I was a student at the Hampton Normal and 
Agricultural Institute, which was at that time under 
the direction of the late General S. C. Armstrong. 
But I recall with interest an experience, earlier 
than my Hampton training, along similar lines of 
enlightenment, which came to me when I was a child. 
Soon after I was made free by the proclamation of 
Abraham Lincoln, there came the new opportunity 
to attend a public school at my home town in West 
Virginia. When the teacher said that the chief 
purpose of education was to enable one to speak 
and write the English language correctly, the state- 
ment found lodgment in my mind and stayed 
there. While at the time I could not put my 
thoughts into words clearly enough to express 
instinctive disagreement with my teacher, this 
definition did not seem adequate, it grated harshly 

3 



4 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

upon my young ears, and I had reasons for feeling 
that education ought to do more for a boy than 
merely to teach him to read and write. While 
this scheme of education was being held up before 
me, my mother was living in abject poverty, lacking 
the commonest necessaries of life, and working day 
and night to give me a chance to go to school for two 
or three months of the year. And my foremost 
aim in going to school was to learn ways and means 
by which I might make life more endurable, and if 
possible even attractive, for my mother. 

There were several boys of our neighbourhood 
who had superior school advantages, and who, in 
more than one instance, had reached the point 
where they were called "educated," w^hich meant 
that they could w^rite and talk correctly. But their 
parents were not far removed from the conditions 
in which my mother was living, and I could not 
help wondering wdiether this kind of education 
alone w^as fitted to help me in the immediate needs 
of relieving the hard times at home. This idea, 
however, ran counter to the current of widespread 
opinion among my people. Young as I was, I had 
come to have the feeling that to be a free boy meant, 
to a considerable extent, freedom from work with 
the hands, and that this new status applied espe- 
cially to the educated boy. 

Just after the Civil War the Negro lad was strongly 
influenced by two beliefs; one, that freedom from 



MORAL VALUES OF HAND WORK 5 

slavery brought with it freedom from hard work, 
the other that education of the head would bring 
even more sweeping emancipation from work with 
the hands. It is fair to add that the Negro was 
not directly responsible for either of these ideas, 
but they warped his views nevertheless, and held 
sway over the masses of the young generation. I 
had felt and observed these things, and further, 
as a child in Virginia, had naturally noted that 
young white boys whose fathers held slaves did not 
often work with their hands. 

Not long after I had begun to think of these new 
conditions and their results, viewing them as 
seriously as could be expected of an ignorant boy, 
an event of my working life left important influences 
in its wake. There lived a little way from my 
mother's cabin a woman of wealth, who had lived 
many years in the South, although she had been 
born and educated in Vermont. She had a high 
respect for manual labour, showing actively her 
appreciation of the dignity of honest work well done, 
and, notwithstanding her own position and culture, 
she was not ashamed to use her hands. In the neigh- 
bourhood, this lady was reputed to be exceedingly 
hard to please in the performance of any sort of 
work on her place, and among the village boys 
she was called a "hard person to get along with." 

As I remember, at least half a dozen boys had 
been successively chosen to live with her, but their 



6 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

residence in service had been consistently short- 
lived. I think a week was about the average 
period, in spite of the widely advertised fact that 
the household had the redeeming reputation of 
always providing good things to eat. In addi- 
tion to pies and cakes, which boys in a com- 
munity like ours seldom saw in their own cabin 
homes, the orchards around the house bore heavy 
yields of the finest fruits, yet such extraordinary 
inducements as these could not hold the boys, who 
one by one returned to the village with the same 
story, that the lady of the mansion was too strict 
and too hard to please. 

After a long record of these mutual disappoint- 
ments, my mother told me that my turn had come, 
as the rich and exacting personage had sent to ask 
me to come and live with her, with the promise of 
five dollars a month in wages. After a long and 
serious talk with my mother I decided to miake the 
effort to serve this woman, although the tidings of 
so many failures filled me with foreboding. A few 
days later, with my clothes made as presentable as 
possible, and with my heart thumping in fear and 
anxiety, I reported for duty. 

I had heard so much about Mrs. Ruffner, her 
wealth, her fine house, and her luxurious surround- 
ings, overshadowed by her appalling severity and 
exacting discipHne, that I trembled with a terror 
which I shall not try to describe at the thought of 



MORAL VALUES OF HAND WORK 7 

facing her. My life had been lived in a cabin, and 
I was now to try to toil in what looked to me like 
a grand mansion, an enchanted palace filled with 
alarms. But I got a grip on all the courage in my 
scanty stock, and braced myself to endure the 
ordeal with all possible fortitude. 

The meeting was not at all what I had expected. 
Mrs. Ruffner talked to me in the kindliest way, and 
her frank and positive manner was tempered with 
a rehearsal of the difiQculties encountered with the 
boys who had preceded me, how and why they had 
failed to please, and what was expected of them 
and of me. I saw that it would be my fault if I 
failed to understand my duties, as she explained 
them in detail. I would be expected to keep my 
body clean and my clothes neat, and cleanliness was 
to be the motto in all my work. She said that all 
things could be done best by system, and she ex- 
pected it of me, and that the exact truth at all 
times, regardless of consequences, was one of the 
first laws of he;: household — a law whose violation 
could never be overlooked. 

I remember, too, that she placed special emphasis 
upon the law of promptness, and said that excuses 
and explanations could never be taken in the place 
of results. At the time, this seemed to me a pretty 
stern program to live up to, and I was fighting a 
sense of discouragement when, toward the end of 
the interview, she told me that if I were able to 



8 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

please her she would permit me to attend school 
at night during the winter. This suggestion so 
stimulated my ambition that it went a long way 
toward clinching the decision to make the effort 
of my life to satisfy my employer and to break all 
records for length of service in her household. 

My first task, as I remember it, was to cut the grass 
around the house, and then to give the grounds a 
thorough "cleaning up." In those days there 
were no lawn-mowers, and I had to go down on 
my knees and cut much of the grass with a little 
hand-scythe. I soon found that my employer not 
only wished the grass cut, but also demanded that it 
be trimmed smooth and even. Any one who has 
tried to mow a lawn with a dull hand-scythe or 
sickle can realise the difficulties which beset this 
labour. I am not ashamed to say that I did not 
succeed in giving satisfaction the first, or even the 
second or third time, but at last I made the turf 
in that yard look as smooth and velvety as if I had 
been over it with the most improved pattern of lawn- 
mower. With this achievement my sense of pride 
and satisfaction began to stir itself and to become 
a perceptible incentive. I found, however, that 
cutting the grass was not the whole task. Every 
weed, tuft of dead grass, bit of paper, or scrap of 
dirt of any kind must be removed, nor did I succeed 
at the first attempt in pleasing my employer. Many 
times, when tired and hot with trying to put this 



MORAL VALUES OF HAND WORK 9 

yard in order, I was heartsick and discouraged and 
almost determined to run away and go home to my 
mother. 

But I kept at it, and after a few days, as the 
result of my efforts under the strict oversight of my 
mistress, we could take pleasure in looking upon a 
yard where the grass was green, and almost perfect 
in its smoothness, where the flower beds were 
trimly kept, the edges of the walks clean cut, and 
where there was nothing to mar the well-ordered 
appearance. 

When I saw and realised that all this was a 
creation of my own hands, my whole nature began 
to change. I felt a self-respect, an encouragement, 
and a satisfaction that I had never before enjoyed 
or thought possible. Above all else, I had acquired 
a new confidence in my ability actually to do things 
and to do them well. And more than this, I found 
myself, through this experience, getting rid of the 
idea which had gradually become a part of me, 
that the head meant everything and the hands 
little in w^orking endeavour, and that only to labour 
with the mind was honourable while to toil with the 
hands was unworthy and even disgraceful. With 
this vital growth of realisation there came the 
warm and hearty commendation of the good woman 
who had given me what I now consider my first 
chance to get in touch with the real things of hfe. 

When I recall this experience, I know that then 



lo WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

and there my mind was awakened and strengthened. 
As I began to reap satisfaction from the works of 
my hands, I found myself planning over night how 
to gain success in the next day's efforts. I would 
try to picture the yard as I meant it to look when 
completed, and laid awake nights trying to decide 
upon the prettiest curves for the flower beds and 
the proper width of the walks. I was soon far 
more absorbed in this work than in filling in my 
leisure time seeking mischief with the village boys. 

I remained in this family for several years, and 
the longer I was employed there the more satisfaction 
I got out of my work. Instead of fearing the 
woman whom the other boys had found so formid- 
able, I learned to think of her and to regard her now 
(for she still lives) as one of my greatest teachers. 
Later, whether working in the coal mines or at 
the salt furnaces, I learned to find the same kind of 
satisfaction in everything I did for a livelihood. 
If while sweeping or dusting a room, or weeding a 
bed of flowers or vegetables, there remained the 
least imperfection, I was unhappy, and felt that I 
was guilty of dishonesty until the flaw in my work 
had been removed. 

While I have never wished to underestimate the 
awakening power of purely mental training, I 
believe that this visible, tangible contact 
with nature gave me inspirations and ambitions 
which could not have come in any other way. I 



MORAL VALUES OF HAND WORK ir 

favour the most thorough mental training and the 
highest development of mind, but I want to see 
these linked with the common things of the universal 
life about our doors. 

It was this experience in using my hands that led 
me, in spite of all the difficulties in the way, to go 
to the Hampton Institute, where I had learned that 
pupils could have not only their minds educated, 
but their hands trained. When I entered the 
Hampton Institute few industries were taught 
there, but these had to do with the fundamentals of 
every-day life. The hand work began with the 
duties which lay directly in the path of the student. 
We were taught to make our own beds, to clean our 
rooms, to take care of the recitation rooms, and 
to keep the grounds in order. Then came lessons 
in raising our food on the farm and the proper 
methods of cooking and serving it in the school. 
The instruction in iron and wood-work in the 
earlier years of the institution was mostly in making 
and repairing the farming implements and in helping 
to maintain the buildings. 

While much of this work may seem rudimentary, 
it had great educational value. How well I re- 
member the feeling of stimulus and satisfaction 
inspired by the sight of a perfectly made bed, 
the pillows placed always at the right angle, 
and the edges of the sheets turned over according 
to rules of neatness and system. The work of the 



12 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

farm had a similar kind of influence upon my views 
of relative values in education. I soon learned that 
there was a great difference between studying about 
things and studying the things themselves, between 
book instruction and the illumination of practical 
experience. 

This chain of experiences, whose links I have tried 
to indicate, served as a preparation for the work of 
training the head, the heart, and the hands which 
I was to undertake later at the Tuskegee Normal 
and Industrial Institute in Alabama. When I 
went to Alabama to begin this work, I spent some 
time in visiting towns and country districts in order 
to learn the real conditions and needs of the people. 
It was my ambition to make the little school which 
I was about to found a real service in enriching 
the life of the most lowly and unfortunate. With 
this end in view, I not only visited the schools, 
churches, and farms of the people, but slept in 
their one-roomed cabins and ate at their tables 
their fare of corn-bread and fried pork. 

Often while making these visits, both in the towns 
and in the plantation districts, I found young men 
and women who had acquired considerable education, 
but it seemed to be Hmitcd to memorising certain 
rules in grammar and arithmetic. Some of them 
had studied both the classic and modern languages, 
and I discovered students who could solve problems 
in arithmetic and algebra which I could not master. 



MORAL VALUES OF HAND WORK 13 

Yet I could not escape the conviction that the more 
abstract these problems were, and the further they 
were removed from the life the people were then 
living, or were to live, the more stress seemed to be 
placed upon them. One of the saddest features 
was to find here and there instances of those who 
had studied what was called " art" or " instrumental 
music," in other words "the elegant accompHsh- 
ments," but who were living in houses where there 
was no sign of beauty or system. There was not 
the slightest indication that this art or these accom- 
pHshments had had or ever would have any influence 
upon the life in the homes of these people. 

Indeed, it did not seem to have occurred to them 
that such things ought to have any relation to their 
every-day Hfe. I found young men who could 
wrestle successfully with the toughest problems in 
"compound interest or banking" or "foreign ex- 
change," but who had never thought of trying to 
figure out why their fathers lost money on every 
bale of cotton raised, and why they were continually 
mortgaging their crops and falling deeper into debt. 
I talked with girls who could locate on the map 
accurately the Alps and the Andes, but who had 
no idea of the proper position of the knives and 
forks on the dinner table. I found those who 
remembered that bananas were grown in certain 
South and Central American countries, but to 
whom it had never occurred that they might 



14 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

be a nourishing and appetising food for their break- 
fast tables. 

In a country where pigs, chickens, ducks, geese, 
berries, peaches, plums, vegetables, nuts, and other 
wholesome foods could be produced with little 
effort, school teachers were eating salt pork from 
Chicago and canned chicken and tomatoes sent 
from Omaha. While the countryside abounded in 
all manner of beautiful shrubbery and fragrant 
flowers, few of these ever found their way into the 
houses or upon the dinner tables. While in many 
instances the people had always lived in the country, 
and would continue to do so, what few text-books 
I saw in their cabins w^ere full of pictures and 
reading matter relating to city life. In these text- 
books I saw pictures of great office buildings, ships, 
street-cars, warehouses, but not a single picture of 
a farm scene, a spreading apple-tree, a field of grass 
or corn, a flock of sheep, or a herd of cows. 



CHAPTER II 
Training for Conditions 

The preliminary investigation of certain phases 
of the life of the people of my race led me to make 
a more thorough study of their needs in order that 
I might have more light on the problem of what the 
Tuskegee Institute could do to help them. Before 
beginning work at Tuskegee I had felt that too 
often in educational missionary effort the tempta- 
tion was to try to force each individual into a 
certain mould, regardless of the condition and needs 
of the subject or of the ends sought. It seemed to 
me a mistake to try to fit people for conditions which 
may have been successful in communities a thousand 
miles away, or in times centuries remote, without 
paying attention to the actual life and needs of those 
living in the shadow of the institution and for 
whom its educational machinery must labour. 

In the beginning of my work, when I thought it 
necessary to investigate at closer range the history 
and environment of the people around us, it soon 
became evident that this data was a valuable basis 
for the undertaking at Tuskegee. For it was demon- 
strated that we were about to take a share in the 

15 



i6 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

burden of educating a race which had had little or 
no need for labour in its native land, before being 
brought to America — a race which had never known 
voluntary incentives to toil. 

The tropical climate had been generous to the 
inhabitant of Africa and had supplied him without 
effort with the few things needful for the support 
of the body. I had cause to recall the story of a 
native who went to sleep on his back in the morning 
under a banana tree with his mouth open, confident 
that before noon a providential banana would fall 
into his mouth. While the African had little oc- 
casion to work with his hands in the land of his 
nativity, by the end of his period of slavery in this 
country he had undergone two hundred and fifty 
years of the severest labour. Therefore, many 
friends of the race argued that the American Negro, 
of all people, ought to be released from further hand- 
training, especially while in school. Others said 
that the Negro had been worked for centuries, and 
now that the race was free there ought to be a 
change. 

At Tuskcgee we replied that it was true that the 
race had been worked in slavery, but the great 
lesson which the race needed to learn in freedom 
was to work. We said that as a slave the Negro was 
worked ; as a freeman he must learn to work. There 
is a vast difference between working and being 
worked. Being worked means degradation ; working 




"—,•" -.vn 



X 



X. 



X 



•J, 



TRAINING FOR CONDITIONS 17 

means civilisation. This was the difference which 
our institution wished chiefly to emphasise. We 
argued that during the days of slavery labour was 
forced out of the Negro, and he had acquired, for 
this reason, a dislike for work. The whole ma- 
chinery of slavery was not apt to beget the spirit 
of love of labour. 

Because these things were true we promised to 
try to teach our students to lift labour out of 
drudgery and to place it on a plane where it would 
become attractive, and where it would be something 
to be sought rather than something to be dreaded 
and if possible avoided. 

More than this, we wanted to teach men and 
women to put brains into the labour of the hand, 
and to show that it was possible for one with the 
best mental training to work with the hands without 
feeling that he was degraded. While we were con- 
sidering our plans at Tuskegee, many persons argued 
with me, as they had done with General Armstrong 
years before, at Hampton, that all the Negro youth 
needed as education was mental and religious 
training, and that all else would follow of itself. 

Partly in answer to this argument, we pointed to 
our people in the republic of Hayti, who were freed 
many years before emancipation came to our race 
in the Southern States. A large number of the 
leading citizens of Hayti during the long period of 
years had been given a most thorough mental 



i8 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

training not only in Hayti but in France, and the 
Catholic Church had surrounded the population 
from birth with religious influences. Many Haytians 
had distinguished themselves in the study of philoso- 
phy and the languages, and yet the sad fact remained 
that Hayti did not prosper. 

I wish to be entirely fair to the Haytians. Hayti 
exports annually from sixty to eighty million pounds 
of coffee and several hundred million pounds of 
precious woods. A French statistician says that 
"among the sixty countries of the globe which carry 
on regular commerce with France, Hayti figures in 
the seventeenth place. In amount of special duties 
received at the French Custom House upon the 
products imported from those sixty countries, Hayti 
comes in the fourth rank. " It seems well to observe, 
then, that here is the foundation for the upbuilding 
of a rich and powerful country, with great natural 
resources. It seems all the more inexcusable that 
industrial conditions should be as unsatisfactory as 
they are. 

The thoughtful and progressive men in the 
republics of Hayti and Santo Domingo now recognise 
the fact that while there has always been a demand 
for professional men and women of the highest type 
of scholarship, at the same time many of these 
scholars should have had such scientific and in- 
dustrial education as would have brought them 
into direct contact with the development of the 



TRAINING FOR CONDITIONS 19 

material resources of the country. They now see 
that their country would have been advanced far 
beyond its present condition, materially and morally, 
if a large proportion of the brightest youths had been 
given skilled handicrafts and had been taught the 
mechanical arts and practical methods of agriculture. 
Some of them should have been educated as civil, 
mining, and sanitary engineers, and others as archi- 
tects and builders ; and most important of all, agri- 
culture should have been scientifically developed. 
If such a foundation had been laid it is probable that 
Hayti would now possess good public roads, streets, 
bridges, and railroads, and that its agricultural and 
mining resources would have made the country 
rich, prosperous, and contented. 

It is a deplorable fact that one of the richest 
islands in natural resources in the world is compelled 
to import a large proportion of its food and clothing. 
It is actually true that many of the people of Hayti, 
some of them graduates of the best universities of 
France, content themselves w^ith wearing clothes 
imported from Europe. It is also true that great 
quantities of canned meats and vegetables are 
brought from the United States, commodities which 
could easily be produced at their very doors. The 
Haytians claim, however, that most of the imported 
food is for the use of foreigners, as they, themselves, 
eat very little meat that is not freshly cooked. 
The people live almost wholly upon the primitive 



20 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

products of undisturbed nature, and the greater part 
of the harvesters and other workers are women. 

I have been told, upon rehable authority, that 
the majority of the educated persons in the island 
take up the professions, and that because there is 
almost no industrial development of the country, 
the lawyer, naturally, finds himself without clients, 
and he, in common with others of the educated 
classes, spends much of his time in writing poetry, 
in discussing subjects in abstract science, or em- 
broiling his country in revolutions. 

In recent years I have received most urgent 
appeals from both Hayti and Santo Domingo for 
advice and assistance in the direction of educating 
industrial and scientific leaders. The best friends 
of Hayti and Santo Domingo now reahse that 
tremendous mistakes have been made. They see 
that if the people had been taught in the beginning 
of their freedom that all forms of idleness were 
disgraceful and that all forms of labour, whether 
with the head or with the hand, were honourable, 
the country to-day would not be in. such stress of 
poverty. They would have fewer revolutions, be- 
cause the people would have industries to occupy 
their time, their thoughts, and their energies. 
I ought to add that, in such deficiencies as these, 
Hayti is perhaps not worse off than some South 
American republics which have made the same 
mistakes. 



TRAINING FOR CONDITIONS 21 

The situation in these countries which have 
overlooked the value of industrial training remind 
me of a story told by the late Henry W. Grady about 
a country funeral in Georgia. The grave was dug 
in the midst of a pine forest, but the pine cofifin 
that held the body was brought from Cincinnati. 
Hickory and other hard woods grew in abundance 
nearby, but the wagon on which the coffin was 
drawn came from South Bend, Indiana, and the 
mule that drew the wagon came from IMissouri. 
Valuable minerals were close to the cemetery, but 
the shovels and picks used in digging the grave 
came from Pittsburg, and their handles from 
Baltimore. The shoes in w^hich the dead man was 
buried came from Lynn, Massachusetts, his coat 
and trousers from New York, his shirt from Lowell, 
Massachusetts, and his collar and tie from Phila- 
delphia. The only things supplied by the county, 
with its wealth of natural resources, was the corpse 
and the hole in the ground, and Mr. Grady added 
that the county probably would have imported 
both of these if it could have done so. 

When any people, regardless of race or geo- 
graphical location, have not been trained to habits 
of industry, have not been given skill of hand in 
youth, and taught to love labour, a direct result is 
the breeding of a worthless idle class, which spends 
a great deal of its time in trying to live by its wits. 
If a community has been educated exclusively on 



2 2 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

books and has not been trained in habits of applied 
industry, an unwholesome tendency to dodge 
honest productive labour is likely to develop. As 
in the case of Hayti, the people acquire a fatal 
fondness for wasting valuable hours in discussing 
politics and conspiring to overthrow the govern- 
ment. I have noted, too, that when the people 
of a community have not been taught to work 
intelligently with their hands, or have not learned 
habits of thrift and industry, they are likely to be 
fretting continually for fear that no one will be left 
to earn a living for them. 

There are few more dismal and discoin-aging 
sights than the men of a community absorbed in 
idle gossip and political discussion. I have seen 
more than a dozen white men in one small town 
take their seats under a tree or on the shady side 
of the street as early as eight o'clock in the morning 
and talk politics until noon. Then they would go 
home for dinner, and return at one o'clock to spend 
the remainder of the day threshing out the same 
threadbare topics. Their greatest exertion during 
the whole long day would be in moving from the 
sunny side of the street or tree to the shady side 
and back again. A curious trait of such parasites 
is that they are always wondering why "times are 
hard," and why there is so little money in circulation 
in their communities. 

An argument handed down from Reconstruction 



TRAINING FOR CONDITIONS 23 

times was once urged by many people, both 
white and coloured, against industrial education. 
It was to the effect that because the white South 
had from the first opposed what is popularly called 
"higher education" for the Negro, this must be the 
only kind good for him. I remember that when I 
was trying to establish the Tuskegee Institute, nearly 
all the white people who talked with me on the sub- 
ject took it for granted that instruction in Greek, 
Latin, and modem languages would be main features 
in our curriculum ; and I heard no one oppose what 
it was thought our course of study would embrace. 
In fact, there are many white people in the South at 
the present time who do not know that the dead 
languages are not taught at Tuskegee, 

Further proof of what I have said will be furnished 
by the catalogs of the schools maintained by the 
Southern States for Negro people, and managed by 
Southern white people; it will be found that in 
almost every instance instruction in the higher 
branches is given with the consent and approval 
of white officials. This was true as far back as 
1880. It is not unusual to meet even at this time 
Southern white people who are as emphatic in their 
belief in the value of classical education as a certain 
element of the coloured people themselves. But the 
bulk of opinion in the South had little faith in the 
efficacy of the "higher" or any other kind of edu- 
cation for the Negro. They were indifferent, but 



24 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

did not openly oppose. Not all have been indifferent, 
however, for there has always been a potent element 
of white people in all the Southern States who have 
stood up openly and bravely for the education of 
all the people, regardless of race. This element has 
had considerable success thus far in shaping and 
leading public opinion, and I believe it will become 
more and more influential. This does not mean 
that there is as yet an equitable division of the 
school funds raised by common taxation. 

While the education which we proposed to give at 
the Tuskegee Institute was not spontaneously wel- 
comed by the white South, it was this training of the 
hands that furnished the first basis for anything like 
united and sympathetic interest and action between 
the two races at the South and the whites at the 
North and those at the South. Aside from its 
direct benefits to the Negro race, industrial educa- 
tion, in providing a common ground for understand- 
ing and cooperation between the North and South, 
has meant more to the South and to the cause of 
education than has been realised. 

Many white people of the South saw in the move- 
ment to teach young Negroes the necessity and 
honour of work with the hands a means of leading 
them gradually and sensibly into their new life of 
freedom, without too sudden a transition from one 
extreme to the other. They perceived, too, that 
the Negroes who were master carpenters and con- 



TRAINING FOR CONDITIONS 25 

tractors under the guidance of their owners could 
greatly further the development of the South if 
their children were not too suddenly removed from 
the atmosphere and occupations of their fathers, 
but taught to use the thing in hand as a foundation 
for still higher growth. Some were far-sighted 
enough to see that industrial education would 
enable one generation to secure economic indepen- 
dence, and the next, on this foundation, to obtain 
a more abstract education, if desired. The indi- 
vidual and community interest of the white people 
was directly appealed to by industrial education. 
They perceived that intelligence, coupled with skill, 
would add wealth, in which both races would in- 
creasingly share, to the community and to the State. 
While crude labour could be managed and made to 
some degree profitable under the methods of slavery, 
it could not be so utilised in a state of freedom. 
Almost eveiy white man in the South was directly 
interested in agricultural, mechanical, or other 
manual labour ; in the cooking and serving of food, 
laundering and dairying, poultry-raising, and every- 
thing related to housekeeping in general. There 
was no family whose interest in intelligent and skill- 
ful nursing was not now and then quickened by the 
presence of a trained nurse. 

Therefore there came to be growing appreciation 
of the fact that industrial education of the black 
people had a practical and vital bearing on the life 



26 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

of every white family in the South. There was little 
opportunity for such appreciation of the results of 
mere literary education. If a black man became 
a lawyer, a doctor, a minister, or. an ordinary teacher, 
his professional duties would not ordinarily bring 
him in touch with the white portion of the com- 
munity, but rather confine him to his own race. 
While professional education was not opposed by 
the white South as a whole, it aroused little or no 
interest, beyond a confused hope that it would 
produce a better and higher type of Negro man- 
hood. Industrial education, however, soon recom- 
mended itself to the white South, when they saw the 
Negro not only studying chemistry, but its applica- 
tions to agriculture, cooking, and dairying; not 
merely geometry and physics, but their application 
to blacksmithing, brickmaking, farming, and what 
not. A common bond at once appeared between 
the two races and between the North and the South. 
A class of people in the South also favoured indus- 
trial education because they saw that as long as the 
Negro kept abreast in intelligence and skill with the 
same class of workmen elsewhere, the South, at 
present free from the grip of the trade union, would 
continue free from its restrictive influences. I 
should like to make a diversion here to call attention 
to the fact that official records show that within one 
year about one million foreigners came into the 
United States, yet practically none of the immigra- 







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TRAINING FOR CONDITIONS 27 

tion went into the Southern States. The records 
show that in 1892 only 2,278 all told went into the 
States of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, 
Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Ten- 
nessee, and Virginia. One ship sometimes brings as 
many as these to New York in one trip. Foreigners 
avoid the South. It must be frankly recognised by 
the people of that section that for a long period they 
must depend upon the black man to do for it what 
the foreigner is doing for the Great West, and that 
they cannot hope to keep pace with the progress of 
people in other sections if one-third of the population 
is ignorant and without skill. If the South does not 
help the Negro up, it will be tying itself to a body of 
death. If by reason of his skill and knowledge one 
man in Iowa can produce as much corn in a season 
as four men can produce in Alabama, it requires 
little reasoning to see that Alabama will buy most 
of her corn from Iowa. 

An instance which illustrates most interestingly 
the value of education that concerns itself with the 
common things about us, is furnished by Professor 
Geo. W. Carver, the Director of our Agricultural 
Department. For some time it has been his custom 
to prepare articles containing information concern- 
ing the condition of local crops, and warning the 
farmers against the ravages of certain diseases and 
insects. Some months ago a white landholder in 
Montgomery County asked Mr. Carver to inspect his 



28 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

farm. While doing so, Mr. Carver discovered traces 
of what he thought was a valuable mineral deposit 
used in making a certain kind of paint. The inter- 
ests of the agricultural expert and the landholder 
at once became mutual. Mr. Carver analysed speci- 
mens of the deposits in the laboratory at Tuskegee 
and sent the owner a report of the analysis, with a 
statement of the commercial application and value 
of the mineral. It is an interesting fact that two 
previous analyses had been made by chemists who 
had tabulated the constituents with greatest accu- 
racy, but failed to grasp any idea of value in the 
deposits. I need not go into the details of this 
story, except to say that a stock company, com- 
posed of some of the best w^hite people in Alabama, 
has been organised, and is now preparing to build a 
factory for the purpose of putting the product on 
the market. I hardly need add that Mr. Carver 
has been freely consulted at every step, and that his 
services have been generously recognised in the 
organisation of the concern. 

Now and then my advocacy of industrial edu- 
cation has been interpreted to mean that I am 
opposed to what is called "higher" or "more intel- 
lectual" training. This distorts my real meaning. 
All such training has its place and value in the 
development of a race. Merc training of the hand 
without mental and moral education would mean 
little for the welfare of any race. All are vital factors 



TRAINING FOR CONDITIONS 29 

in a harmonious plan. But, while I do not propose 
that every individual should have hand training, I 
do say that in all my contact with men I have never 
met one who had learned a trade in youth and 
regretted it in manhood, nor have I ever seen a 
father or mother who was sorry that his children 
had been taught trades. 

There is still doubt in many quarters as to the 
ability of the Negro, unguided, and unsupported, to 
hew out his own path, and put into visible, tangible, 
indisputable forms the products and signs of civil- 
isation. This doubt cannot be extinguished by 
mere abstract arguments, no matter how ingeniously 
and convincingly advanced. Quietly, patiently, dog- 
gedly, through summer and winter, sunshine and 
shadow, by self-sacrifice, by foresight, by honesty 
and industry, w^e must re-enforce arguments with 
results. One farm bought, one house built, one 
home neatly kept, one man the largest tax-payer 
and depositor in the local bank, one school or church 
maintained, one factory running successfully, one 
truck-garden profitably cultivated, one patient cured 
by a Negro doctor, one sermon well preached, one 
office well filled, one life cleanly lived — these will 
tell more in our favour than all the abstract eloquence 
that can be summoned to plead our cause. Our path- 
way must be up through the soil, up through swamps, 
up through forests, up through the streams and rocks ; 
up through commerce, education, and religion ! 



30 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

In my opinion we cannot begin at the top to build 
a race, any more than we can begin at the top to 
build a house. If we try to do this, we shall reap in 
the end the fruits of our folly. 



CHAPTER III 
A Battle Against Prejudice 

When the first few students began to come to 
Tuskegee I faced these questions which were inspired 
by my personal knowledge of their lives and sur- 
roundings : 

What can these young men and women find to do 
when they return to their homes? 

What are the industries in which they and their 
parents have been supporting themselves? 

The answers were not always to my liking, but 
this was not the point at issue. I had to meet a con- 
dition, not a theory. What I might have wanted 
them to be doing was one thing; what they were 
actually doing was the bed-rock upon which I hoped 
to lay the foundation of the work at Tuskegee. 

It was known that a large majority of the 
students came from agricultural districts and 
from homes in which agriculture in some form 
was the mainstay of the family. I had learned 
that nearly eighty per cent of the population 
of what are commonly called the Gulf States 
are dependent upon agricultural resources, directly 
or indirectly. These facts made me resolve to 

31 



32 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

attempt in downright earnest to see what the Tus- 
kegee Institute could do for the people of my race 
by teaching the intelligent use of hands and brains 
on the farm, not by theorising, but by practical 
effort. The methods in vogue for getting enough 
out of the soil to keep body and soul together were 
crude in the extreme. The people themselves 
referred to this heart-breaking effort as "making a 
living." I wanted to teach them how to make 
more than a living. 

I have little respect for the farmer who is satisfied 
with merely "making a living." It is hardly 
possible that agricultural life will become attrac- 
tive and satisfactory to ambitious young men or 
women in the South until farming can be made as 
lucrative there as in other parts of the country 
where the farmer can be reasonably sure of being 
able to place something in the bank at the end of 
the year. For the young farmer to be contented he 
must be able to look forward to owning the land 
that he cultivates, and from which he may later 
derive not only all the necessities of life, but some 
of the comforts and conveniences. The farmer must 
be helped to get to the point where he can have 
a comfortable dwelling-house, and in it bathtubs, 
carpets, rugs, pictures, books, magazines, a daily 
paper, and a telephone. He must be helped to 
cherish the possibility that he and his family will 
have time for study and investigation, and a little 







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A BATTLE AGAINST PREJUDICE 33 

time each year for travel and recreation, and for 
attending lectures and concerts. 

But the average farmer whom I wanted to help 
through the medium of the Tuskegee Institute was 
far from this condition. I found that most of the 
farmers in the Gulf States cultivated cotton. Little 
or nothing in the form of stock or fowls, fruits, 
vegetables, or grain was raised for food. In order 
to get the food on which man and live stock were 
to live while the cotton crop was being grown, a 
mortgage or lien had to be given upon the crop, or 
rather upon the expected crop, for the legal papers 
were usually signed months in advance of the 
planting of the crop. 

Cotton in the South has been known for years 
as "the money crop." This means that it is the 
one product from which cash may be expected 
without question as soon as the crop is harvested. 
The result of this system has been to discourage 
raising anything except cotton, for the man who 
holds the mortgage upon the crop discourages, and 
in some cases prevents, the farmer from giving much 
of his time and strength to the growing of anything 
except cotton, since the money-lender is not sure that 
he can get his money back from any other crop. 

The result of this has been that, beginning in 
January, the farmer had to go to the store or to the 
money-lender for practically all of his food during 
the year. The rate of interest which the farmer had 



34 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

to pay on his "advances" was in many cases enor- 
mous. The farmer usually got his "advances" or 
provisions from a storekeeper. The storekeeper in 
turn bon-owed money from the local bank. The 
bank, as a general thing, borrowed from New York. 
By the time the money reached the farmer he 
had to pay in not a few cases a rate of interest 
which ranged from 15 to 30 per cent. If he 
failed to make his payment at the end of the year 
he was likely to be "cleaned up" — that is, 
everything in sight in the way of crops or live 
stock was taken from him. After being "cleaned 
up" he would either try to make another crop 
on the same rented farm — trusting to Providence 
or the weather for better luck — or else move to 
another farm and go in search of some one else to 
"inin him," as the local expression describes the 
process. Not a few of the farmers whom I met had 
been "cleaned up" half a dozen times or more. 

In addition to having to pay the high rate of 
interest for food supplies and clothing advanced, 
the ground rent was also to be paid. By far the 
greater part of the land was rented. This, of 
course, had a hurtful effect. Because the man who 
tilled the land did not own it, his main object was 
to get all he could out of the property and return 
to it as little as possible. The results were shown 
in the wretched cabins and surroundings. If a 
fence was out of repair, or the roof of the house 



A BATTLE AGAINST PREJUDICE 35 

leaked, the tenant had no personal interest in 
keeping up the premises, because he was always 
expecting to move, and he did not want to spend 
money upon the property of other people. 

Instead of returning the cotton-seed to the ground 
to help enrich the soil, he sold this valuable fertiHser. 
The land, of course, was more impoverished each 
year. Ditching and terracing received little at- 
tention. The mules with which the crops were 
made were rented or were being bought "on time," 
as a rule, and the farmer did not have enough direct 
interest in them to encourage him to spend money 
in keeping them in prime condition. Besides, the 
food fed to the animals was not raised on the place, 
but had to be bought. 

Another serious result of the "one-crop" system 
was that the farmers handled almost no cash except 
in the fall. To the ignorant and inexperienced 
men of my race this was hurtful. If by any chance 
they were able to pay their ground rent, and the 
principal and exorbitant interest charged for their 
"advances," and have a few dollars in cash left, the 
money did not remain with them long, for it came 
into their hands about Christmas time, when the 
temptation to spend it for whisky, cheap jewelry, 
cheap buggies, and such unprofitable articles was 
too strong to be resisted. Had the same value been 
in the hands of the farmer in the form of corn, 
vegetables, fruit, stock, or fowls it would have been 



36 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

not only less likely to be wasted, but it would, also 
have been available for the farmer and his family 
during the whole or the greater part of the year. 

The conditions which I have described had a dis- 
couraging effect upon many people who tried to 
get their living from the soil. As numbers of them 
expressed it to me, if they worked hard during the 
year they came out at the end in debt, and if they 
did not work they found themselves in debt anyhow. 
Some w^ent so far as to perform only sufficient work 
to "make a show" of raising enough cotton on 
which to get "advances" during the year, with no 
thought of ridding themselves of debt or of coming 
out ahead. 

Notwithstanding these conditions, there were in- 
stances each year of individuals who triumphed over 
all these difficulties and discouragements and came 
out with considerable money or cotton to their 
credit. These men soon got to the point where they 
could begin to buy their own homes. 

In justice to the class of men in the South who 
advance money or provisions each year to the 
farmers, I ought to say that many of them deplore 
the state of affairs to which I have referred as much 
as any one, but with them it is simply a system of 
lending money on uncertain security. If these 
advances were not made, in many instances the 
farmers and their families would starve. The 
average merchant prefers to deal with the man who 



A BATTLE AGAINST PREJUDICE 37 

owns his land and can pay cash for his goods, but 
the many ramifications of the mortgage system 
make both the farmer and the money-lender slaves 
to the one-crop plan. If cotton fails, or if the 
tenant abandons the crop before it is matured, 
the money-lender is bound to lose. Both with the 
farmer and the money-lender it has been like the 
old story of the man hugging the bear, each des- 
perately anxious to find a way to get free. 

From the first I was painfully conscious of the 
fact that I could do very little through the work of 
the Tuskegee Institute to help the situation, but I 
was determined to make an effort to do what I 
could. Many of my own race had been reduced to 
discouragement and despair. Before the school 
could begin its practical help I spent all the time 
that could be spared in going about among the 
people, holding meetings, and talking with individual 
leaders, to arouse their ambition, and inspire in 
them hope and confidence. 

My first effort was to try to help the masses 
through the medium of the thing that was nearest 
to them, and in which they had the most vital and 
practical interest. I knew that if we could teach a 
man's son to raise forty bushels of corn on an acre 
of ground which had before produced but twenty 
bushels, and if he could be taught to raise this corn 
with less labour than before, we should gain the con- 
fidence and sympathy of that boy's father at once. 



38 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

In this connection I have often thought that 
missionaries in foreign countries would make greater 
progress if at first more emphasis were placed upon 
the industrial and material side than upon the 
purely spiritual side of education. Almost any 
heathen family would, I believe, appreciate at once 
the difference between a shack and a comfortable 
house, while it might require years to make them 
appreciate the truths of the Bible. Through the 
medium of the home the heart could be reached. 
Not long ago I was asked by a missionary who was 
going into a foreign field what, in my opinion, he 
ought to teach the people, and how he ought to 
begin. I asked him what the principal occupation 
of the people was among whom he was going, and 
he repHed that it was the raising of sheep. I 
advised him, then, to begin his missionary work by 
teaching the people how to raise more sheep than 
they were raising and better sheep, and said that I 
thought the people would soon decide that a man 
who could excel them in the raising of sheep might 
also excel them in the matter of religion, and that 
thus the foundation for effectual mission work might 
be laid. 

The first few students of our school came largely 
from the farming districts. The earliest need at 
the Tuskegee School was food for teachers and 
students. I said: "Let us raise this food, and 
while doing so teach the students the latest and 



A BATTLE AGAINST PREJUDICE 39 

best methods of farming." At the same time we 
could teach them the dignity and advantages of 
farm Hfe and of work with their hands. It was 
easy to see the reasons for doing this, and easy 
to resolve to do it, but I soon found that there 
were several stubborn and serious difficulties to 
be overcome. The first and perhaps the hardest 
of these was to conquer the idea, by no means 
confined to my race, that a school was a place where 
one was expected to do nothing but study books; 
where one was expected not to study things, but 
to study about things. Least of all did the students 
feel that a school was a place wliere one would be 
taught actually to do things. Aside from this, the 
students had a very general idea that work with the 
hands was in a large measure disgraceful, and that 
they wanted to get an education because education 
was something which was meant to enable people 
to live without hand work. 

In addition to the objections named, I found that 
when I began to speak very gently and even cau- 
tiously to the students about the plan of teaching 
them to work on the farm, two other objections 
manifested themselves with more or less emphasis. 
One was that most of the students wanted to get 
out of the country into a town or a city, and the 
other that many of them said they were anxious to 
prepare themselves for some kind of professional 
life, and that they therefore did not need the farm 



40 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

work. The most serious obstacle, however, was 
the argument that since they and their parents for 
generations back had tilled the soil, they knew all 
there w^as to be known about farming, and did not 
need to be taught any more about it while in school. 

These objections on the part of the students were 
reinforced by the parents of many of them. Not a 
few of the fathers and mothers urged that because 
the race had been worked for two hundred and fifty 
years or more, now it ought to have a chance to 
rest. With all of my earnestness and argument I 
was unable in the earlier years of the school to 
convert all the parents and students to my way of 
thinking, and for this reason many of the students 
went home of their own accord or were taken home 
by their parents. None of these things, however, 
turned the school aside from doing the things which 
we were convinced the people most needed to have 
done for them. 

I shall always remember the day when we decided 
actually to begin the teaching of farming — not out 
of books, but by real and tangible work. In the 
morning I explained to the young men our need of 
food to eat, and the desire of the school to teach 
them to work with their hands. I told them that 
we would begin with the farm, because that was 
the most important need. The young men were 
greatly surprised when the hour came to begin work 
to find me present with my coat off, ready to begin 



A BATTLE AGAINST PREJUDICE 41 

digging up stumps and clearing the land. As my 
first request was more in the forni of an invitation 
than a command, I found that only a few reported 
for work. I soon learned, too, that these few were 
ashamed to have any one see them at work. After 
we had put in several hours of vigorous toil I noticed 
that their interest began to grow, because they came 
to realise that it was not my farm they were helping 
to cultivate, but that it belonged to the school, in 
which we all had a common interest. The next 
afternoon a larger number reported for duty. Thev 
were still shy about having any one see them at 
work, however, and were especially timorous at the 
idea of being caught in the field by the girl students. 
Gradually, year by year, the difficulties which I 
have enumerated began to melt away, but not 
without constant effort and very trying embarrass- 
ments. It soon became evident that the students had 
practical knowledge of only one industry, and that 
was the cultivation of cotton in the manner in 
which it had been grown by their fathers for years. 
Another defect soon became evident, and that was 
that they had little idea of caring for tools or live 
stock. Plows, hoes, and other farming implements 
were left in the field where they were last used. If 
quitting time came when the hoe was being used in 
the middle of a field or at the end of a row, the tool 
remained there over night. Where the last plowing 
in the fall was done, there the plow would most 



42 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

likely spend the winter. No better care than this 
was given to wagons or harness, and mules and 
horses shared this impartial neglect. 

It was the custom in the earlier days of the school 
— as it is now — for students and teachers to assemble 
in the evening for prayers. After considerable 
ineffective effort to teach the students to put their 
implements away properly at night, I caused a mild 
sensation at evening prayers by calling the names of 
three students who had left their implements in the 
field. I said that these three students would be 
excused from the room to attend to this duty, and 
that we would not proceed with the service until their 
return, and that I felt sure they would be more 
benefited by prayer and song after having done 
their work well than by leaving it poorly done. A 
few lessons of this kind began to work a notable 
betterment in the care with which the students 
looked after their implements, and attended to 
other details of their daily round. 




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CHAPTER IV 
Making Education Pay Its Way 

I CANNOT emphasise too often the fact that my 
experience in building up the Tuskegee Institute 
has taught me year by year the value of hand work 
in the building of character. I have frequently 
found one concrete, definite example illustrating the 
difference between right and wrong worth more 
than hours of abstract lecturing on morality. I 
have told girls many times that a dish is either 
thoroughly washed and dried or it is not. If a 
thing is not well done, it is poorly done. Further- 
more, I have taught our girls from the beginning 
of this school that a student who receives pay for 
properly attending to dishes, and does her work 
poorly, is guilty of two wrongs. She is guilty of 
falsehood and guilty of receiving money for doing 
something which she has not done. 

This lesson taught in the kitchen, with the care- 
lessly cleaned utensil in evidence as an illustration, 
has a power that is hard to resist. Just so the 
implement left in the field over night has many 
times been made to teach the same lessons — of 
warning against untruth and dishonesty. Leaving 

43 



44 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

it there was untruthful, because the student had 
said by his action that he had properly performed 
the work of the day; it was dishonest because the 
school had been robbed of a portion of the value of 
the implement by reason of the rain and dew falling 
on it and causing it to rust and depreciate in value. 

In the beginning our methods of instruction in 
farming were primitive and crude, but month by 
month, and year by year, steady growth encouraged 
our efforts. One difficulty to which I have not 
referred was that the land on which we began work 
was not the richest in the world. When attention 
was called by the students and others to the poor 
quality of the soil, I replied that poor soil was the 
best in which to begin the teaching of agriculture, 
because this would give us an opportunity to learn 
to make poor land rich. I told them also that if 
we could teach the students how to cultivate 
poor land profitably they would have little difficulty 
in making more than a living upon fairly good or 
rich soil. 

Apart from the problems found on the school 
grounds, our methods were at first misunderstood 
by school officials in high authority throughout 
the country, and our aims were not appreciated 
by other schools established in the South for the 
education of my race. I remember that after I 
had spoken for an hour at a meeting of a State 
Teachers' Association, trying to explain the mean- 



MAKING EDUCATION PAY ITS WAY 45 

ing and advantages of industrial education or hand 
work, a teacher arose and asked the State super- 
intendent, who was present, a very simple ques- 
tion regarding the subject. The superintendent 
repHed that he would have to refer the question 
to me, as the subject was one that he had never 
heard discussed before. It happened occasionally 
that students on their way to the Tuskegee Institute 
were asked if they were going to an "ox-driving 
school," the question implying, I suppose, that 
the main thing taught at Tuskegee was ox-driving. 
Our critics, however, did not know that at the time 
we were too poor to own oxen, and that on our 
little farm we had nothing in the way of draught 
animals except one poor bHnd horse which a white 
friend in Tuskegee had given us. 

During the first year the training in agriculture 
on the school farm consisted of about two hours of 
work daily for each of the young men students, the 
remaining time being spent in the class rooms. The 
outdoor period, during the first school session, was 
mostly spent in grubbing up stumps, felHng trees, 
building fences, making ditches, and in plowing the 
ground preparatory to planting a little crop. We had 
few implements with which to do this work, and most 
of these were borrowed. The reader will realise how 
hard it must have been under these conditions to 
make the student feel that he was acquiring new 
knowledge of farm life. As I recall it now, I am 



46 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

sure that the main thing that we were able to teach 
the students in those early days was that book 
education did not mean a divorce from work with 
the hands. 

Gradually we were able to secure more land for 
farming purposes and to cultivate what we did 
have to better advantage. As the school grew, we 
learned more about the proper fertilisation of the 
soil, and how to use labor-saving machinery more 
effectively. It was surprising to note how many 
of the students believed that farm labour must 
from its very nature be hard, and that it was not 
quite the proper thing to use too much labour-saving 
machinery. Indeed, many of the white planters in 
certain sections of the South have until recently 
refused to encourage the use of much agricultural 
machinery, for the reason, as they stated it, that 
such assistance would spoil the Negro " farm hands." 
For some years the Tuskegee Institute did not 
escape this charge As our department of farming 
grew from month to month, I was not afraid to let 
it be known that I felt certain that one result of any 
proper system of hand training was to spoil, or 
get rid of, the ordinary "farm hand." If one will 
study the industrial development of the South, lie 
will be forced to the conclusion that one of the 
factors that has most retarded its progress has 
been and is the "farm hand." This individual has 
too long controlled the agriculture of the South. 



MAKING EDUCATION PAY ITS WAY 47 

With few exceptions, he is ignorant and unskilled, 
with little conscience. He seldom owns the land 
which he pretends or tries to cultivate. Too often 
he is a person who has no permanent abiding place, 
and if he has one it is probably a miserable one- 
room cabin. The "farm hand" can be hired for 
from forty to sixty cents a day. In fact, I have 
known of cases where such men were hired for 
twenty-five cents a day and their board ; and they 
were very dear help even at that price. 

I believe that most of the worn-out and wasted 
fields, the poor stock, the run-down fences, the lost 
and broken faiTQ tools and machinery, as well as 
the poor crops, are chargeable to the "farm hand" 
whom, I have been warned so many times, I must 
be careful not to spoil. Such a man is too ignorant 
to know what is going on in the world in pro- 
gressive agriculture. He is without skill to such 
an extent that he knows almost nothing about 
setting up and operating labour-saving machinery. 
His conscience has not been trained, and hence he 
has little idea of giving an honest day's labour for a 
day's pay, and of doing unto others in matters of 
labour as he would have others do unto him. 

It will be seen at a glance that such a worker in 
the soil as this cannot compete with the farmer of 
the Northwest, who owns the land that he cultivates, 
who is intelligent, and who uses the latest improved 
farm machinery. One such man is worth as much 



48 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

to the general industrial interests of a country as 
three "farm hands." No country can be very 
prosperous unless the people who cultivate the soil 
own it and live on it. I repeat, then, that one of 
my first thoughts in beginning agricultural training 
at the Tuskegee Institute was to help to replace 
the "farm hand" of the South with something 
better. 

As an illustration of the need of new ideas in farm- 
ing, and of the effect that the long-continued cul- 
tivation of a single crop has upon the tiller, I remem- 
ber that some years ago I invited a fanner into my 
office and explained to him in detail how he could 
make thirty dollars an acre on his land if he would 
plant a portion of it in sweet potatoes, whereas if he 
planted cotton, as he had been doing for years, he 
could make only fifteen dollars per acre in the best 
season. As I explained the difference, step by step, 
he agreed with me at every point, and when I came 
near to the end of my argument I began to congratu- 
late myself that I had converted at least one man 
from the one-crop system to better methods. Finally, 
with what I fear was the air of one who felt that he 
had won his case, I asked the farmer what he was 
going to cultivate on his land the coming year. The 
old fellow scratched his head, and said that as he was 
getting old, and had been growing cotton all his life, 
he reckoned lie would grow it to the end of his few 
remaining years, although he agreed with me that 



MAKING EDUCATION PAY ITS WAY 49 

he could double the product of his land by planting 
sweet potatoes on it. 

Soon after we had succeeded in clearing the trees 
and stumps from a few acres of ground, we planted a 
small crojx This crop, as I have stated, was not 
very different from others which the students had 
seen planted or had taken part in planting at their 
homes, because the school was poor in implements 
and stock. The main difference between our first 
crop and those which the students had come into 
contact with at their homes was that ours was 
to some extent a diversified crop. The increas- 
ing number of students soon made it necessary 
to increase the acreage of land cultivated. In 
the first few months of the Tuskegee Institute the 
students boarded in families. This made it difficult 
to get the greatest value out of our farm products. 
Partly to overcome this, we arranged to begin 
boarding the students upon the school grounds. 
Here another difficulty presented itself. It was 
found that a student would be of little value to the 
farm and would gain very little in knowledge and 
skill if he worked only a few hours each day. We 
discovered that, after there had been subtracted the 
minutes required for him to reach his work, get his 
tools, and otherwise prepare himself, little time 
would be left for getting actual results out of the 
soil. In order to overcome this weakness in our sys- 
tem, we decided to follow in some measure the plan 



50 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

originated by General Armstrong at the Hampton 
Institute. This was to have the students study in 
the class rooms during four days of the week, and 
work on the farm two days. The students, however, 
for a long while refeiTed to these two days as " lost 
days." 

It was often amusing, as well as interesting, to note 
the intense faith of the students in their books. The 
larger the book and the bigger the words it contained, 
the more highly it was revered. At this time 
there w^ere almost no text-books which dealt with 
industrial subjects. For this reason, any one who 
wanted to give instructions in such branches had, in 
a very large measure, to "blaze" his way. The 
absence of text-books on these subjects made it all 
the more difficult at first to combine industrial and 
academic teaching. We partly solved the problem 
by having the students work two days at some 
industry and study four days in the school-room. 

We found it advisable to consider not only the best 
system of teaching in our practical work, but the 
economic values also. We felt that it would be pos- 
sible to teach the students the latest and best meth- 
ods of jjerforming all kinds of hand work, and at the 
same time show them the dignity of such service. 
But in addition to this we wanted the students to do 
such work as they could about the school, work 
which otherwise would have been done by hired 
men not connected with the institution. 



MAKING EDUCATION PAY ITS WAY 51 

We felt, therefore, that the fair thing to do 
would be to arrange some scheme by which the 
student would receive compensation for all the 
work of value which he did for the school. This we 
felt was not only just, but would emphasise another 
valuable element in teaching. The lack of this 
economic emphasis I have always felt to be one of 
the weak points in manual training. To enable us 
to meet this condition, we decided to have the stu- 
dents board on the school grounds, to charge them 
eight dollars per month for their board, and then to 
give them credit on their board-bills for all the work 
they did which proved to have productive or money- 
saving value. 

Aside from the economic results of the work, we 
knew that the mere effort on the part of the student 
to help himself through school by labour would pre- 
vent our making " hot-house plants " of our students, 
and would prove worth while in character building. 
In all cases payment for work depended upon the 
individual efforts of the students. One of the 
dominating purposes kept always in mind was to 
give the student a chance to help himself by means 
of some industry. In this connection, I beg to say 
that in my judgment the whole problem of the future 
of my race hinges largely upon the question: "To 
what extent will the Negro, when given a chance, 
help himself, and make himself indispensable to the 
community in which he lives?" 



52 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

We soon learned that in the practical application 
of our scheme' the average student would earn 
from two to three dollars a month by working two 
days in the week, leaving only five or six dollars to 
be paid in cash. Some students were so much 
in earnest that they worked out more than half of the 
eight dollars. This opportunity proved a god- 
send to most of the students, as very few of them 
w^ere able to pay the eight dollars a month in cash 
during nine months of the year. Aside from other 
considerations, we began to find out that we could 
quickly test the worth of a student by the degree 
of earnestness which he evinced in helping himself 
through labour with his hands. After a little 
while, many of the students began to take 
great pride in telling their parents at the end of 
each month how much they had helped them- 
selves through their work on the farm or in other 
industries. This information and enthusiasm came 
in time to have its influence in leading the parents 
to appreciate the value of hand training. 

As the school grew in size and experience, it 
became apparent that we ought to find a way to 
help the large number of young men and women 
who were constantly seeking admission, but who 
had no money with which to pay any portion of 
their expenses. We became convinced that some 
of the most promising and worth}^ students were 
those who came from the country districts, where 



MAKING EDUCATION PAY ITS WAY 53 

they had had very few advantages of book 
education. They had little or no money, but 
they had good strong bodies, and were not ashamed 
to work with their hands. In reaching this class of 
students I found that my experience at the Hampton 
Institute was of great advantage. We decided to 
start a night school for students who could not 
afford to go to school in the day time. The num- 
ber who availed themselves of this arrangement was 
very small at first. We began by making a written 
contract with each student to the effect that he or 
she was to work during the whole of the day at 
some industry, and study in the class room for two 
hours at night, after the day's work was completed. 
In order to put this plan upon a sound basis, the 
following form of contract was signed: 

TUSKEGEE NORMAL AND INDUSTRIAL 

INSTITUTE. 

(incorporated.) 

This agreement, made the seventeenth day of October, 1902, 
between James C. Black, of the first part, and Booker T. Wash- 
ington, Principal of The Tuskegee Normal and Industrial 
Institute, of the second part, 

Witnesseth, that the said James C. Black has agreed faith- 
fully, carefully and truly to serve The Tuskegee Normal and 
Industrial Institute, in whatever capacity the said Booker T. 
Washington, Principal, etc., or those deputed by him, may 
designate, from date hereof to the seventeenth day of October, 
1904. 

In consideration of service to be rendered by James C. Black, 



54 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

the said Booker T. Washington, Principal, etc., has agreed to 
allow said James C. Black eight dollars per month, provided he 
remains until October 17, 1904; otherwise he has agreed to 
pay him at the rate of one-fifth of that sum per month for the 
time he may have been in the service of The Tuskegce Normal 
and Industrial Institute; this latter amount to include all 
amounts which may have been charged against said James C. 
Black. 

It is agreed, further, that the amount earned shall be reserved 
in the hands of the said Booker T. Washington, Principal, etc., 
the same to be used in paying the expenses of said James C. 
Black in the regular classes of The Tuskegee Normal and In- 
dustrial Institute. In case the said James C. Black leaves 
school voluntarily, or is dismissed after the expiration of the 
time for which he agrees to serve, he is to forfeit all that the 
school may owe him at that time. 

It is further agreed that no part of what said James C. Black 
may earn shall be transferred to another's account, btit shall be 
kept for James C. Black's exclusive use after he shall have 
entered the Day School. 

It is distinctly understood that what said James C. Black 
may earn is for the purpose of paying board, and no part can 
be drawn in cash. 

In witness whereof, we have hereunto set our hands and seals. 

James C. Black (L. S.) 
Booker T. Washington (L. S.) 

Witness :j^^^^'^ ^- Blackett 
<- George F. May 



# 



CHAPTER V 
Building Up a System 

The system we decided to use at Tuskegee 
divided the school into two classes of students: 
those who worked with their hands two days in the 
week, and spent four days in the class room ; and the 
night students, who, through the first year of their 
course, worked all day with their hands and spent 
their evenings in the class rooms. Of course, the 
student who worked ten hours each day was paid 
more than the one who laboured only two days in 
the week. The night-school students were to earn, 
not only their board, but something in addition. 
The surplus was to be used in paying their expenses 
in the regular day school after they had remained 
in the night school one or two years as they might 
elect. The night school, besides other opportu- 
nities, gave the student a chance to get a start 
in his books and also in some trade or industry. 
With this as a foundation, I have rarely seen a 
student who was worth much fail to pass through 
the regular course. 

The night school had not been in session many 
weeks before several facts began to make them- 

55 



56 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

selves prominent. The first was the economic 
value of the work of the night students. It was 
plain that these students could perform much 
labour for which we should otherwise have had 
to pay out cash to persons not connected with the 
institution. It is true that the work at first was 
crude, but it should be remembered that in the 
earlier years the whole school was crude. All work 
in laying the foundation for a race is crude. 

The economic value of hand work at the Tuskegee 
Institute can be illustrated in no better way than by 
data of the construction of our buildings. When a 
friend has given us twenty-five thousand dollars for 
a building, instead of having it constructed by an 
outside contractor, we have had the students pro- 
duce the material and do the work as far as possible, 
and through this method a large proportion of the 
money given for the building passes into the hands 
of the students, to be used in gaining an education. 
The plan has a double value, for, in addition to the 
twenty-five thousand dollars which is diverted into 
channels through which a large number of students 
get an education, the school receives the building 
for permanent use. 

Let us value the work at Tuskegee by this test: 
The plans for the Slater- Armstrong Memorial Trades' 
Building, in its main dimensions 283 x 315 feet, and 
two stories high, were drawn by a coloured man, our 
instructor in mechanical drawing. Eight hundred 



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BUILDING UP A SYSTEM 57 

thousand bricks were required in its construction, 
and every one of them was manufactured by our 
students while learning the trade of brick-making. 
All the bricks were laid into the building by students 
who were being taught the trade of brickmasonry. 
The plastering, carpentry work, painting, and tin- 
roofing were done by students while learning these 
trades. The whole number of students who received 
training on this building alone was 196. It is 
lighted by electricity, and all the electric fixtures 
were put in by students who were learning electrical 
engineering. The power to operate the machinery 
in this building comes from a 125 horse-power engine 
and a 75 horse-power boiler. All this machinery 
was not only operated by students who were learning 
the trade of steam engineering, but was installed by 
students under the guidance of their instructor. 

For other examples of the amount of work 
that our students do in the direction of self-help, I 
would mention the fact that they manufactured 
2,990,000 bricks during the past twelve months; 
1,367 garments of various kinds have been made in 
the tailor shop, and 541,837 pieces have been laun- 
dered in the laundry division by the girls. 

Agriculture is the industry which we plan to make 
stand out most prominently; and we expect more 
and more to base much of our other training upon 
this fundamental industry. There are two reasons 
why we have not been able to send out as many 



58 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

students from our agricultural department as we 
have desired: 

First, agriculture was the industry most disliked 
by the students and their parents in the earlier 
years of the school. It required nearly ten years 
to overcome this prejudice. 

Second, nearly all of our buildings, seventy-two 
in number, have been built by the students, and the 
building trades have, of necessity, been emphasised. 
As soon as the building period slackens, we 
shall be able to send out a larger number skilled in 
all the branches of agriculture. 

I have been asked many times about the progress 
of the students in the night school as compared with 
those in the day school. In reality, there is little 
difference. A student who studies two hours at night 
and works w4th his hands ten hours during the day, 
naturally covers less ground in the text-books than 
the day student, yet in real sound growth and the 
making of manhood, I question whether the day 
student has much advantage over the student in 
the night school. There is an indescribable some- 
thing about work with the hands that tends to de- 
velop a student's mind. The night-school students 
take up their studies with a degree of enthusiasm and 
alertness that is not equalled in the day classes. I 
have known instances where a student seemed 
so dull or stupid that he made practically no 
progress in the study of books. He was away 




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BUILDING UP A SYSTEM 59 

from the books entirely for a few months and 
put to work at a trade; at the end of a few 
months he has returned to the class room, and it 
has been surprising to note how much more easily he 
could master the text-books than before. There is 
something, I think, in the handling of a tool that 
has the same relation to close, accurate thinking that 
writing with a pen has in the preparation of a manu- 
script. Nearly all persons who write much will 
agree, I think, that one can produce much more 
satisfactory work by using the pen than by dicta- 
tion. 

While speaking of the effect of careful hand 
training on the development of character, it is worth 
while to mention an uncommonly instructive exam- 
ple. If any one goes into a community North or 
South, and asks to have pointed out to him the" man 
of the Negro race of the old generation, who 
stands for the best things in the life of the 
coloured community, in six cases out of ten, I 
venture to say, he will be shown a man who 
learned a trade during the days of slavery. A few 
years ago, James Hale, a Negro, died in Montgomery, 
Alabama. He spent the greater part of his life 
as a slave. He left property valued at fifty 
thousand dollars, and bequeathed a generous sum 
to be used in providing for an infirmary for the bene- 
fit of his race. James Hale could not read or write 
a line, yet I do not beheve that there is a white or 



6o WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

black man in Montgomery who knew Mr. Hale who 
will not agree with me in saying that he was the first 
coloured citizen of Montgomery. I have seldom met 
a man of any race who surpassed him in sterling 
qualities. When Mr. Hale was a slave his master 
took great pains to have him well trained as a car- 
penter, contractor and builder. His master saw 
that the better the slave was trained in handicraft, 
the more dollars he was worth. In my opinion, it was 
this hand-training, despite the evil of slavery, that 
largely resulted in Mr. Hale's fine development. If 
Mr. Hale was all this with mere hand training, what 
might he have been if his mind had also been care- 
fully educated? Mr. Hale was simply a type of 
many men to be found in nearly every part of the 
country. 

The average manual-training school has for its 
main object the imparting of culture to the student; 
while the economic element is made secondary. At 
the Tuskegee Institute we have always emphasised 
the trade or economic side of education. With any 
ignorant and poverty-stricken race, I believe that the 
problem of bread- winning should precede that of cul- 
ture. For this reason the students who have attended 
the night school at Tuskegee have, as a rule, mas- 
tered the principles and practice of agriculture, or 
have been taught a trade by means of which we felt 
sure they could earn a living. With the question of 
shelter, food and clothing settled, there is a basis for 



BUILDING UP A SYSTEM 6i 

what are considered the higher and more important 
things. 

We have, therefore, emphasised the earning value 
of education rather than the finished manual train- 
ing, being careful at the same time to lay the founda- 
tions of thorough moral, mental and religious instruc- 
tion. In following this method something may be lost 
of the accuracy and finish which could be obtained 
if a course in manual training preceded the indus- 
trial course, but the fact that the student is taught 
the principles of house-building in building a real 
house, and not a play house, gives him a self-reliance 
and confidence in his ability to make a living, that 
manual training alone could not give. The boy in the 
conditions surrounding the average Negro youth, leav- 
ing school with manual training alone, finds himself 
little better off than he was before, so far as his 
immediate and pressing problem of earning a living 
is concerned. He and those dependent upon him 
want at once food, shelter, clothing and the oppor- 
tunity to live properly in a home. Industrial edu- 
cation takes into consideration the economic ele- 
ment in production in a way that manual training 
does not, and this is of great value to a race just 
beginning its career. 

While I am speaking of the comparative value of 
manual training and industrial education, there is 
one other difference between them to which I ought 
to call attention. The proportion of students who 



62 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

complete an industrial or trade course is likely to be 
smaller than the proportion completing a literary or 
manual training course. For example, a boy comes 
to Tuskegee Institute, as has often happened, from 
a district where he has been earning fifty cents a 
day. At Tuskegee he works at the brickmason's 
trade for nine months. He cannot master the trade 
during this time, but he gets a start in it. At the 
end of the nine-months' session, if he returns home, 
this student finds himself in demand in the com- 
munity, at wages which range from one dollar and a 
half to two dollars a day. Unless he is a man of extra- 
ordinarily strong character, he will be likely to yield 
to the temptation to remain at home, and become 
a rather commonplace mason, instead of returning 
and finishing his trade, in order that he may become 
a master workman. So far I have been unable to 
discover any remedy that will completely offset this 
tendency. The most effective cure for it, so far as 
my experience is concerned, is an appeal to the pride 
of the student. 

Another question often asked me is, how long 
it will take an industrial school to become self- 
supporting. To this question I always reply that I 
know of no industrial school that is self-supporting, 
nor do I believe that any school which performs its 
highest functions as an industrial school will become 
so. I believe that it is the duty of all such schools 
to make the most of the economic element — ^to make 




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BUILDING UP A SYSTEM 63 

each industry pay in dollars and cents just as far as 
is possible. — but the element of teaching should be 
made the first consideration, and the element of 
production secondary. Very often at the Tuskegee 
Institute it would pay the institution better to keep 
a boy away from the farm than to have him spend 
a day at work on it ; but the farm is for the boy, 
and not the boy for the farm. 

An industrial school is continually at work on raw 
material. When a student gets to the point where 
he can build a first-class wagon or buggy, he is not 
retained at the school to build these vehicles merely 
for their economic value, but is sent out into the world 
to begin his life's work ; and another student is taken 
in his place to begin the work afresh. The cost of 
teaching the new student and the waste of material 
weigh heavily against the cost of production. 
Hence, it can easily be seen that it is an almost 
impossible task to make money out of an industrial 
school, or to make it self-supporting. The moment 
the idea of " making it pay " is placed uppermost, 
the institution becomes a factory, and not a school 
for training head and hand and heart. 

One of the advantages of the night school at 
Tuskegee is in the sifting-out process of the stu- 
dent body. Unless a student has real grit in him 
and means business, he will not continue very long 
to work with his hands ten hours a day for the 
privilege of studying two hours at night. Though 



64 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

much of the work done by students at an industrial 
school like Tuskegee does not pay, the mere effort 
at self-help on the part of the student is of the 
greatest value in character building. 

Most races have come up through contact with 
the soil, either directly or indirectly. There is some- 
thing about the smell of the soil — a contact with a 
reahty that gives one a strength and development 
that can be gained in no other way. In advocating 
industrial training for backward or weak races or 
individuals, I have always kept in mind the 
strengthening influence of contact with a real 
thing, rather than with a third-rate imitation of a 
thing. 

The great lesson which the race needs to learn in 
freedom is to work willingly, cheerfully and efficiently. 
In laying special stress upon hand training for a 
large proportion of my race, I ask no peculiar edu- 
cation for the Negro, because he is a Negro, but I 
would advocate the same training for the German, 
the Jew, or the Frenchman, were he in the same 
relative stage of racial development as the masses of 
the Negroes. While insisting upon thorough and 
high-grade industrial education for a large proportion 
of my race, I have always had the greatest sympathy 
with first-class college training and have recognised 
the fact that the Negro race, like other races, must 
have thoroughly trained college men and women. 
There is a place and a work for such, just as there is 



BUILDING UP A SYSTEM 65 

a place and a work for those thoroughly trained with 
their hands. 

I shall never forget a remark I once heard 
made by a lady of foreign birth. She had recently 
arrived in America, and by chance had landed in 
one of our largest American cities. As she was a 
woman of considerable importance, she received 
lavish social attention. For weeks her life was spent 
in a round of fashionable dressing, dining, automo- 
biling, balls, theaters, art museums, card parties, and 
what not. When she was quite worn out, a friend 
took her to visit the Hampton Normal and Agri- 
cultural Institute. There she saw students and 
teachers at work in the soil, in wood, in metal, in 
leather, at work cooking, sewing, laundering. She 
saw a company of the most devoted men and women 
in the world giving their lives in the most unselfish 
manner, that they might help to put a race on its 
feet. It was then that she exclaimed in my presence : 
" What a relief ! Here I have found a reality ; and I 
am so glad that I did not leave America before I 
saw it." 

I think I was able to understand something 
of her feeling. In the history of the Negro 
race since freedom, one of the most difficult 
tasks has been to teach the teachers and 
leaders to exercise enough patience and foresight 
to keep the race down to a reality, instead 
of yielding to the temptations to grasp after 



66 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

shadows and. superficialities. But the race itself is 

learning the lesson very fast. Indeed, the rank and 

file learn faster than some of the teachers and 
leaders. 




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CHAPTER VI 
Welding Theory and Practice 

Broom-making has been recently ineludcd among 
the industries for girls at Tuskegec. Hundreds of 
brooms were being worn out every year in sweeping 
the floors of more than seventy buildings; and I 
venture to say that more brooms were used up for 
the same amount of floor space than at almost any 
other institution of the kind. Wherever you may 
go in the shops, or halls, you will find some one 
busy with a broom most of the time. The litter 
in the carpenter shop or the mattress-making room 
is not allowed to accumulate until the end of the 
day, but is swept up so often that visitors some- 
times ask me whether there is a moment of the 
working day when some one is not wielding a busy 
broom somewhere in the institution. 

It was this reason that inspired the home manu- 
facture of the needed supply of brooms. It had 
been found possible to supply most of the needs of 
the school by student labour, and after establishing 
a summer canning factory, which Chaplain Penney 
directs while the Bible School is not in session, 
making brooms seemed a natural evolution of 

67 



68 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

supply and demand. But investigation showed 
that none of the instructors knew anything about 
making brooms, and that the Experimental Farm 
had not yet taken up the task of raising broom- 
corn. These obstacles were not serious in com- 
parison with many others which had been attacked 
in the industrial school. 

A way was found to make the first sample 
broom, and gradually the needed machinery 
was installed. Then the director of the Agri- 
cultural Department discovered that broom-corn 
could be raised on the farm, and now students 
can be equipped to take the industrial knowledge 
home with them, and also to grow the crop 
on their own farms. This department keeps 
the school supplied with good brooms at small 
cost, and out of a minor need grew another 
useful industry. The lesson in this little story 
is that finding a way to solve the problems 
closest at home helps to build up the com- 
munity at large. It was found, also, that the 
work of the class room could be correlated even 
with broom-making, and made to harmonise 
with the Tuskegee theory of education of head 
and hands together. The girls were asked to 
write compositions descriptive of their work in 
this industry, and some of these efforts have been 
very creditable. 

I insert one of these compositions as a sample: 




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WELDING THEORY AND PRACTICE 69 



"broom-making" 



" I am a nice large broom just made Tuesday by 
Harriet McCray. Before I was made into a broom, 
I grew over in a large farm with a great many 
others of my sisters. One day I was cut down and 
brought up to the broom-making department, and 
was carefully picked to pieces to get the best straw. 
I was put in a machine called the winder. Here I 
was wound very tightly, and then put in another 
machine called the press. I was pressed out flat 
and sewed tightly. Out of the press I was carried 
to the clipper, and all of my seed and long ends 
were cut off. From the cutter I was carried to the 
threshing machine and combed out thoroughly, and 
put in the barrel for sale. I was sold to the school 
for thirty-five cents. He will use me very roughly 
in doors, and when I begin to get old, I shall be 
used in sweeping the yards. When I am worn com- 
pletely out, I shall be pulled to pieces to get my 
handle, which will be used again to make a fresh, 
new broom." 

Class-room work is also made a part of the training 
in this varied catalogue of industries in successful 
operation at Tuskegee: Agriculture, basketry, 
blacksmithing, bee-keeping, brick-masonry, plaster- 
ing, brick-making, carpentry, carriage trimming, 
cooking, dairying, architectural, free-hand and 
mechanical drawing, plain sewing, dress-making, 



70 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

electrical and steam engineering, founding, harness- 
making, house-keeping, horticulture, canning, laun- 
dering, machinery, mattress making, millinery, 
nurses' training, painting, saw-milling, shoe-making, 
printing, stock-raising, tailoring, tinning, and wheel- 
wrighting. 

It will be seen that the school is a community 
unto itself, in which buildings can be erected, 
finished, and furnished, the table supplied the year 
round, and economic independence achieved in a 
large measure. But this work is for the benefit of 
the student, not to make the school self-supporting. 
Therefore, no one side of his education must be 
neglected in order that he may be for the time a 
more productive labourer in his department of 
industry. It would be wronging both him and the 
system to keep him at the work-bench all the work- 
ing hours in order that he might turn out the 
greatest possible number of shoes, or window sashes, 
or fruit cans in a week. 

For example, if you should chance to visit the 
carpenter shop, you would find a score of young 
men turning out the finished material for some new 
building in process of erection, or at the lathes 
turning out the interior finishings. But in a small 
room in one corner, having a hard time to be heard 
above the din of the steam saws, is an instructor 
with a class of students, who are learning to draw 
up contracts for jobs in carpentry or building. 




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WELDING THEORY AND PRACTICE 71 

They are not going out with the expectation of 
ahvays being carpenters at day wages. They 
should know how to make contracts as "boss 
carpenters," to build houses, or repair them, or 
how to hire other men to build houses for them. 
Therefore, they learn to draw up specifications in 
both legal and practical form, so that when the 
occasion arises they will know how to work with 
intelligence. 

Their class-room work in spelling, mathematics, 
grammar, and English composition comes effectively 
into play. They find out that a carpenter has 
small chance of getting ahead unless he can use 
his head intelligently. He writes out a contract, 
for example, to put up a four-room house, on a 
basis of three cash payments — when he takes the 
job; when the roof is on; and when the house is 
turned over to the owner. This contract is read 
aloud by the instructor, who asks the other members 
of the class to criticise it. One of them points out 
a flaw which would allow the owner to "crawl 
out" of his bargain on a technicality. Another 
is pleased to discover that the arithmetic is so 
faulty that the estimates of the cost of material 
would land the contractor in the poor-house. 
Then the student begins to see that his so- 
called academic teaching is as important in his 
calling as his skill with the plane, the saw and 
the miter-box, and that he cannot hope to 



72 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

become a good carpenter unless he is also a 
diligent scholar. 

In the winter an instructor in the Agricultural 
Classes may teach his students to familiarise them- 
selves, through books, with insect pests which infest 
the peach tree. They are asked to give their 
own ideas of the "borer," or the "scale," but this 
information is not allowed to be packed away in 
the attic of memory, to be forgotten like so. much 
useless lumber. The real examination comes in 
the spring, not in written papers, but in the school 
orchard. The same instructor takes the class 
among the peach trees, and, with branches in their 
hands, they are required to identify the "borer," 
and apply to the trees the remedies laid down in 
their books and lectures. 

When a new building is to be erected, the school 
industries join their activities in a common cause. 
The project sets in motion, first, the wagons to be 
used in removing the excavated material. The 
young men in the wheelwright, blacksmithing, and 
harness-making rooms see their work tested, for 
they have made and equipped all the heavy farm 
wagons needed for this hauling. Along w^ith their 
daily work with the hands, the patterns and in- 
structions had been given them on blackboards 
and in lectures. They have trained their minds, 
they have learned handicraft, and the combined re- 
sults arc applied. Their wagons and harness are not 




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WELDING THEORY AND PRACTICE 73 

to be sent away or put on exhibition. They must 
stand the strain at home, and. if they are faulty 
it cannot be hidden. 

Then come tlie brick-makers, turning out 20,000 
bricks a day in the school kilns. They know 
whether they have made good bricks when they 
see them handled, and put into the walls by the 
student masons. In the course for brick-masonry, 
there is practical demonstration the year round. 
All the brick work on the buildings of the school is 
done by students, under the supervision of the 
instructors. Plastering and repair work, both in- 
side and outside of the buildings, is in charge of 
the Brickmasonry Division. The theory is taught 
in the class room, the practical test is always close 
at hand. The brick-mason and plasterer has one 
hundred and eighteen lessons in the fundamental 
principles of the trade, he is taught how to make 
estimates on different kinds of work, he has a course 
in architectural drawing, and he does research 
work in trade journals. So much for theory, but 
his diploma of efficient mastery of his trade is built 
into the walls of the Tuskegee buildings. They 
show whether he has learned to be a brick-mason, 
or whether he has merely learned things about 
brick-masonry. 

The school sawmill turns out the lumber for the 
building in course of erection. The instruction in 
saw-milling includes these branches of information: 



74 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

"Names of machines and their uses. Care of 
machines. Defects of timber trees. FelHng timber 
trees and loading logs on wagon. Measuring lumber 
and wood. Industrial classes. Drawing. Scal- 
ing logs to find their contents in board measure. 
Grading lumber. Running planer and other ma- 
chines. Care of belts. Saw filing and caring for 
saws. Designing and making cutters for mouldings. 
Calculating speed of pulleys. Arrangment of ma- 
chines in a planing and saw mill, etc." 

Theory and practice in this department are dove- 
tailed in the finished work in the interior of such a 
structure as the Carnegie Library, or the new 
Collis P. Huntington Memorial Building, where 
the wood work, handsomely finished in Southern 
pine, is the product of the school saw-mill and 
planer, the carpenter shops and the paint-shop. 

The equipment of the machinery, engineering, 
and foundry department and the courses of study 
offered are designed to give students a thorough 
training in their various branches. The machine 
shop is equipped with the latest machine tools, 
driven by power from an Atlas engine. All the 
repair work on the mechanical equipment of the 
school, including steam pumps, steam engines, wood- 
working machines, printing presses, metal working 
machines, is done in this shop. About fifty different 
machines outside of this department, including 
the complete steam laundry, the agricultural and 



WELDING THEORY AND PRACTICE 75 

dairy machinery, are in daily operation, furnishing 
the best possible demonstration of the theory 
taught in the classes. In the course for steam 
engineers, the young men are able to study the 
working of eleven different steam engines, seven 
steam pumps, twelve steam boilers, and a complete 
water-works system, with miles of piping, valves, 
gauges, recording apparatus, etc. The instructors 
lay out the courses in theory and written work, 
and the mathematical studies are applied in work 
on blue -print drawings and free-hand sketches. 

A foundry is in daily operation, and here the 
castings used in repair work for the school are 
made. When the Tuskegee cotton-raising party 
went to Africa, the castings for the cotton press 
sent with them were made in the school foundry. 
In the plumbing and steam-fitting division, the 
tools and shop equipment are ample for training in 
lead and iron work, for water and steam piping 
systems in buildings of various kinds. The plumb- 
ing and steam fitting in nearly all the buildings of 
the Institute were done by the classes of this division. 
This work includes sinks, bath-tubs, steatn radiators^ 
lavatories and sanitary closets. More than eight 
miles of piping of various sizes, for steam and water, 
are in use on the school grounds, with all the neces- 
sary valves, expansion joints, unions and fittings. 
The tinsmithing shop turns out nearly every kind 
of tin work from covering a house to making a 



76 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

pepper-box. The apprentice becomes a first-class 
tinsmith in two years' training. More than two 
thousand one-gaUon fruit cans were made by the 
students last year in addition to many other useful 
articles. 

The object of the course in electrical engineering 
is to give the student a foundation upon which he 
may build along any special line he may choose 
later. Arc and incandescent lighting is in use at 
the school, and there is a complete telephone service 
connecting most of the buildings and offices through 
a central station. The students learn not only 
how to install these systems, but to maintain them 
in the highest state of efficiency. The dynamos 
and other electrical machinery of a complete power- 
house are in operation for lighting the school build- 
ings and grounds, so that the student finds practical 
w^ork at every turn in his course. 

He has learned how to build and equip a building. 
He is taught also how to design it in all its parts. 
All students in the day and night schools who are 
in the Mechanical Department are required to take 
instruction in mechanical drawing. The work of 
the first year is largely preparatory. It begins 
with simple geometrical drawing, to accustom the 
student to the use of instruments and to teach him 
accuracy and neatness. This is followed by work 
in projection, which finds application in scale- 
drawing of simple objects. As soon as a fair 




T. 



WELDING THEORY AND PRACTICE 77 

knowledge of the instruments has been attained, 
with a thorough drill in free-hand sketching, the 
study of design is carried far enough to secure an 
understanding of the principles, and facility and ac- 
curacy in the construction of drawing plans. Strictly 
speaking, mechanical drawing begins with the 
second year of trade w^ork, with the study of mate- 
rials and working drawings. During the last 
quarter of the third year the student learns how to 
make blue, solar, and black prints. During the 
fourth year several excursions are made by the 
class to the shops, the buildings under construction, 
the brick-yard, etc. In such excursions detailed 
notes must be taken and a satisfactory report sub- 
mitted upon the things seen and examined. 

The course of architectural drawing covers three 
years, and aims to give thorough instruction in 
drawing, building construction and design. In all 
cases, the general mechanical and artistic training 
is supplemented by the course of study in the 
Academic Department. On entering the third 
year of the architectural course, the student, in 
addition to his regular work, is given actual practice 
in office training and general superintendence. 
The student visits also the trade shops, and is 
required to attend classes in heating, electrical 
lighting, and plumbing. Many of the most satis- 
factory and imposing buildings of the school were 
designed in our architectural department. 



78 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

It will be seen from the foregoing survey that the 
students are able to build and equip a large building 
from top to bottom, inside and out, and these 
object lessons of their own handiwork stand clus- 
tered over many acres, a city in itself built by young 
coloured men, most of whom were wholly ignorant 
of systematic mental or manual training when they 
asked to be admitted to Tuskegee. 

They maintain also what may be called the 
running machinery of the institution. The car- 
penters learn wood-turning and cabinet-making. 
They make the furniture used in the class rooms 
and dormitories. Their regular division has been 
so crowded in recent years that it was found 
necessary to organise an auxiliary division, called 
the "Repair Shop." Here all the school's repairs 
in wood work are done, and the training has 
proved so valuable that it has been made a 
separate course of study extending over three 
years. In the blacksmith shop is performed the 
ironing of carriages, buggies, and wagons, of which 
a hundred are used by the school, in addition to 
making all kinds of implements and the shoeing of 
horses. Hundreds of farm implements are repaired 
here. The student blacksmith is not a mere labourer. 
He is taught how to run a shop of his own. He 
learns how to make out bills for material, how to 
keep shop supplies, and a part of his time is devoted 
to mechanical drawing and class room work. 



WELDING THEORY AND PRACTICE 79 

The division of wheelwrighting is fitted for work 
in all details of the trade. The students have con- 
stantly on hand new work, such as the building of 
wagons, drays, horse and hand carts, wheel-barrows, 
buggies and road carts. A great deal of repair work 
must be done to keep the farm equipment in first- 
class shape, and the shop is constantly patronised 
for this kind of work by the farmers of the town and 
neighbourhood. The school has a standing order 
for farm wagons from merchants in Tuskegee and 
Montgomery. These are turned out complete, and 
have proved serviceable and popular. All of the har- 
ness used by the school, and a large quantity sold 
outside, is made in the harness-making department. 
All the vehicles turned out by the blacksmith and 
wheelwrighting divisions are finished by the students 
in the carriage-trimming shop. 

The visitor, therefore, who wishes to inspect the 
Tuskegee Institute, is met at the station by a car- 
riage built by the students, pulled by horses raised 
on the school farms, whose harness was made in a 
school shop. The driver wears a trim, blue uniform 
made in the school tailor-shop, and shoes made by 
student class work. The visitor is assigned to a 
guest room in a dormitory designed, built, and fur- 
nished by the students. His bathroom plumbing, 
the steam heat in his room, and the electric lighting 
were installed by students. The oak furniture of 
his room came from the shops. The young woman 



8o WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

who takes care of his room is a student working her 
way through the Institute. After supper, she will 
change her wearing apparel to a blue uniform 
dress and a neat straw hat, all made in the 
school. The steam laundry sends over to know if 
the visitor wishes some washing done, and girl 
students send it back, proud of the snowy pohsh of 
shirts and collars. The visitor is asked to be a guest 
in the teachers' dining-hall. The bill of fare may 
read as follows: 

BREAKFAST ! 

Breakfast food, ham, fried cakes, bread, syrup, 
coffee, tea, butter, fruit. 

dinner: 

Roast beef, tomatoes, rice, corn-bread, sweet 
potatoes, buttermilk, snap beans, dessert. 

supper: 

Cold ham, tea, bread, syrup, butter, milk, fried 
potatoes, coffee. 

In looking over this program, the guest will dis- 
cover that the ham, roast beef, vegetables, corn- 
bread, syrup, butter, milk, and potatoes are products 
of the school farms, raised, cared for and produced 
by student labour. 

Throughout these varied fields of industrial and 
productive activity, the following objects are kept 
constantly in view, and their relative importance is 
in the order of their enumeration: 

To teach the dignity of labour. 




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WELDING THEORY AND PRACTICE 8i 

To teach the trades, thoroughly and effectively. 

To supply the demand for trained industrial 
leaders. 

To assist the students in paying all, or a part, of 
their expenses. 



CHAPTER VII 

Head and Hands Together 

That the distinctive feature of Tuskegee Insti- 
tute — ample provision for industrial training— has 
received in the public prints almost exclusive atten- 
tion is not strange. But it is well to remember that 
Tuskegee Institute stands for education as well as 
for training, for men and women as well as for 
bricks and mortar. 

Of course, the distinction involved in the words, 
"education" and "training," is largely theoretical. 
My experience convinces me that training to some 
productive trade, be it wagon-building or farming, 
educates. For example, one of our students is fore- 
man on the large and beautifully planned Collis P. 
Huntington Memorial Building, now in process of 
construction ; that young man is notable for a sim- 
ple honesty, an unobtrusive confidence and self- 
reliance, that abundantly testify to his manliness. 
That this manliness is in large degree directly trace- 
able to his skill and his experience in bearing indus- 
trial responsibihty — in short, to his training — is 
beyond peradventure. Indeed, in running over the 
long list of students who, for one reason or another 

82 



HEAD AND HANDS TOGETHER 83 

— lack of money or lack of taste for books — have 
left Tuskegee without completing the prescribed 
course in the Academic Department, I have been 
forcibly impressed with the fact that training to 
productive industry directly tends to develop sound 
judgment and manly independence — those quaHties 
of the mind and heart that collectively constitute 
the character of the educated man. 

Another example of the effect of the training 
given at the Tuskegee Institute on the mind of the 
student occurs to me. A few weeks ago it was 
decided to modify the Day School system. To 
make any change in a great organisation like ours 
requires great discriminating judgment and care. 
The faculty discussed the change in its every phase, 
and I finally called the students of the four upper 
classes together, presented to them our plans, and ex- 
plained to them the reasons for the proposed change. 

Their response was not a negative acquiescence, 
but a series of direct and searching questions. They 
were alert and quick to see minor defects, and to 
give direct and constructive criticism in regard to 
many details. Their work in the shops and on the 
farm had brought them into touch with real issues 
and real things — their daily work in constructing and 
equipping our buildings and in helping to build the 
institute had brought with it an intelligent interest 
in the school and an enlightened appreciation of 
values ; in other words, it had taught them to think. 



84 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

It is obvious that a man cannot build wagons or 
run a farm with continuous success who is unable to 
read, write, and cipher. But, far deeper than the 
mere commercial advantage of academic studies, is 
the fact that they afford incentives to good 
conduct and high thinking. To make a boy an 
efficient mechanic is good, for it enables him to 
earn a living and to add his mite to the productive- 
ness of society ; but a school must do more — must 
create in him abiding interests in the intellectual 
achievements of mankind in art and literature, 
and must stimulate his spiritual nature. And so 
Tuskegee has always maintained an Academic 
Department, at present housed mainly in four 
buildings. The most important of these are Porter 
Hall, a three-story frame building, the first building 
erected after the opening of the Institute, though 
poor in appointments, yet rich in traditions; 
Thrasher Hall, a handsome three-story brick 
building with well-equipped physical and chemical 
laboratories ; and the Carnegie Library, a beautifully 
proportioned brick structure, which is the center of 
Academic interests. The collection of books is 
well selected, and the generosity of Tuskegee 's 
friends keeps it constantly growing. The admirable 
Collis P. Huntington Memorial Building will be the 
largest building on the grounds, and is to be used 
exclusively for academic purposes. 

On the faculty of the Academic Department are 




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72 



HEAD AND HANDS TOGETHER 85 

twenty-eight men and women of Negro blood with 
degrees from Michigan, Nebraska, Oberhn, Amherst, 
Cornell, Columbia, and Harvard. In order to dis- 
play the character of work done in the Department, 
it may be well for me to explain the course of study 
in some special branches. 

The aim of the work in English in the preparatory 
classes is to bring about familiarity with the mother 
tongue, and coiTectness and ease in its use. From 
contact with good models of spoken or written dis- 
course the pupil learns to appreciate and interpret 
thought well expressed. From the careful attention 
given his own language, he learns to feel the correct- 
ness or incorrectness of an expression, without 
slavish reliance upon rules. In other words, in these 
classes language is taught as an art; the necessary 
rules and definitions, when they occur, are treated 
as working principles, and abundant practice in 
applying them is given. In the advanced years of 
the course, technical grammar is taught because at 
this stage the pupil has already become familiar with 
good usage, and has attained a certain facility in 
employing the mother tongue. He should now be 
taught more thoroughly the fundamental principles 
governing the correct or incorrect use of an expression, 
while in the preparatory classes, oral exercises in 
narration, description and reproduction predominate. 
The pupil is encouraged to talk simply and naturally 
about something he has seen or heard or read. He 



86 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

is taught to exercise care for unity, logical sequence 
of ideas, and smoothness of transition. To the nar- 
ration and description of the lower grades, argu- 
mentation and exposition are added in the advanced 
work, these subjects being expanded to form the 
basis of a course in public speaking. 

The pupil obtains material for themes and debates 
from his experience in shop and field and from lit- 
erature technical to the subject. The themes are 
submitted for correction and in due course com- 
mitted, and, after preliminary training, delivered at 
the monthly public rhetoricals of the class. Except 
for the written brief required of each disputant, 
debates are extemporaneous. In the preparation 
of a program like the following, considerable ex- 
perience and research must necessarily be involved. 

"A" MIDDLE RHETORICAL 

EVENING PRAYER SERVICE 

A Model Southern Farm 

"It is this noble agriculture which feeds the human race and 
all the humbler orders of animated nature dependent on man." 

— Speech by Edward Everett 

* * * 
Overture Orchestra 

1 Choosing and Preparing the Land Leon Harris 

2 The Crops Terry Hart 

Song, "Old Folks at Home" A Middle Quartette 

3 Constructing the Farm House Alonzo Fields 

4 Constructing the Chimneys and Fireplaces. .Charles Weir 
Duet Miss Young, Mr. Weaver 



HEAD AND HANDS TOGETHER 87 

5 Care of the Farm House 

(o) The Dining-room and Kitchen Miss Emma Smith 

(b) Bedrooms and Parlour Miss Pearl Rousseau 

IMusic Waltz Orchestra 

6 The Kitchen Garden Cornelius Richardson 

7 The Poultry-yard and Contents Miss Stella Pinkston 

Music A Middle Brass Quartett 

8 A Model Storage Barn Thomas Brittain 

9 The Farm IMachincry William, Lewis 

Music March Orchestra 

I o The Dairy Herd Mr. Wesley McCoy 

I I A Model Dairy -barn Wm. J. Williams 

Music Polka Orchestra 

Exercises like the foregoing not only assist the 
Industrial Department in its work with the pupil, 
but offer admirable Academic training in English 
and in practical elocution. Besides the discussion 
relative to industrial pursuits, the pupils consider 
questions important to them as future citizens and 
men of business. This phase of the English work 
trains the pupil to rigorous methods of reasoning, 
and to clearness and forcefulness in public discourse. 
Literature in the preparatory classes is taught 
under the head of reading. The physical requisites 
to effective expression receive due attention, but 
great stress is laid upon reading as a means by 
which the mind is furnished with knowledge. 
Literature is taught by reading and language teach- 
ers, the former dealing with the subject-matter for 
literary values, the latter having an eye to con- 
struction. The course is of twofold importance; 
contact with finished style gives to the pupil a sense 



88 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

of what is most fitting and beautiful in expression, 
thus proving an invaluable aid to his own oral 
and written diction. The work of the Senior class 
in English literature and composition aims to 
develop in the pupil power to think clearly and 
logically, and ability to appreciate thought ex- 
pressed by others; to teach clearness and cor- 
rectness of expression together with facility and 
power in the use of language ; to produce an apprecia- 
tion of good books by contact with classic authors ; 
and to give, by an outline study of the history of 
English literature, a proper setting for the authors 
read. To supplement the class-room work in litera- 
ture, a course in home reading has been arranged. 
It is the aim of the division of English to make the 
home reading as much like play as possible, a relax- 
ation from sterner requirements of the curriculum, 
an occupation for idle hours. By persuading the 
most stupid pupil to read books which appeal to 
him, the teacher can lead him gradually to more 
solid literature. 

As personal achievements appeal to the unde- 
veloped mind more strongly than the chronicles of 
conflicts and political changes, the first course in 
history deals with biography. The student is given 
facts in the lives of men, Washington, Jefferson, 
Adams, and is made to feel that these men 
actually lived, that they are not mere abstract 
influences. At the very beginning their lives are 




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HEAD AND HANDS TOGETHER 89 

studied in the light of character building. After 
the first ideas of character building have been 
presented, the next step is to awaken the power of 
the observation, to quicken the imagination. The 
elementary course in English history is adapted to 
this purpose. 

The course in advanced American History is 
for developing judgment and discrimination. Little 
attention is given to the periods of discovery and 
of colonisation, except to show the student how 
the American people, as is true of all great nations, 
began as cultivators of the soil. 

The peculiar position of the Negro in American 
History, from the earliest days of the slave trade, 
through the wars with England and the Civil War, 
to the present time, is given due importance, not 
by isolating it, but by introducing it in its proper 
place with other events. 

In the Senior year, a course is given in the State 
History of Alabama, for the benefit of those who 
wish to fit themselves as teachers in that State. 
The object is to acquaint the Normal student with 
the important facts in the settlement of Alabama, 
its entrance into the Union, and its present industrial 
and political status. 

During the first three years, the course in Geog- 
raphy is taught with Nature Study. In the last 
year, Geography is combined with History. The 
purpose of this arrangement is obvious. Geography 



90 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

is really a broad phase of Nature Study. Questions 
regarding natural features, the sun, moon, planets, 
water-courses, physical points, etc., are explained 
in the course in Nature Study. Hence the pupil 
appreciates all the more what is said about them 
when he comes to them again in his Geography. 
The same intimacy is found in the study of plant 
and animal life, minerals, and rock formation. 

Tuskegee is admirably fitted for the study of 
Geography, and every effort is made to make the 
teaching easily grasped. The industrial shops are 
always open to academic teachers and students. 
When the student takes up the subject of lumber, 
for example, he is able, by going to the shops, to 
understand the various stages through which the 
rough, imcut log must pass in order to make suitable 
building material. Then, too, the school grounds 
are put to excellent use. Various kinds of plant- 
life are studied; hills, valleys, small water-courses, 
examples of erosion, different kinds of soil, are seen 
on every hand. In connection with Nature Study 
and Geography, the pupils are urged to be on the 
alert to detect something new, something which 
they have seen often, but can afterward view in a 
new light because of the information obtained. 

The course in mathematics covers a period of 
seven years, including Arithmetic, Algebra, Geome- 
try, Trigonometry, and Surv^eying. Throughout the 
entire course, the aim is to give the student, as far 



HEAD AND HANDS TOGETHER 91 

as possible, a practical knowledge of the subjects 
embraced. The pupil is required to deal in things 
associated with figures, rather than with figures alone. 
In multiples and measures, his work is brought in 
close and effective touch with the trade work. For 
example, the carpenter must get the greatest com- 
mon length of board from several different lengths 
without any waste: the dressmaker must find and 
use the smallest number of yards of cloth that 
suffice for the making of dresses of different sizes. 
Mathematics is shown to be an instrument of econ- 
omy. In fractions, estimates are made of the cost of 
bales of cotton at prevailing prices. The student is 
often required to weigh out in each case the amounts 
of various articles which can be purchased for given 
amounts of money. In compound quantities and 
in the various measurements, the student does the 
measuring. Yards, rods, tons of coal, and tons of 
hay are measured. In carpeting, he is required to 
carpet a room. In lathing and plastering, he must 
witness the work in active operation. In percentage, 
problems which must be solved in the daily work 
the student is able to get from the industrial depart- 
ments. For example, if the leather for a pair of 
shoes costs a definite amount, and the shoes are sold 
at a definite rate, what per cent, is gained ? Or for 
what must they be sold so as to gain a certain per 
cent. ? 

Much actual outdoor work is done during the 



92 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

study of trigonometry, and in surveying the student 
learns to lay off lots, country roads; to plot, map, 
etc. The last term of the Senior year is spent in 
mastering the elements of Civil Engineering, work 
for which the first two terms have prepared the 
student. The South is sorely in need of surveyors 
and men grounded in the elements of engineering; 
positions of this character are easy to find, and 
pay well. 

The object of the work in Nature Study, as taught 
in the Academic Department, is to train the faculty 
of observation, create an interest in and love of 
nature, gain knowledge which will be of service in the 
future, and to cultivate a practical interest in Agri- 
culture. Knowledge of things near at hand should 
be acquired first, and later of things more distant ; 
a clear and definite acquaintance with home sur- 
roundings (plants, animals, minerals, natural phe- 
nomena, and the human body) is made the basis of 
the teaching as a foundation for more advanced 
study. In the assignment of work and selection of 
material for study, the special needs of special classes 
are kept in mind, the work being determined by the 
student's power of observation and interpretation. 
Subjects for study are selected largely according to 
the seasons. This work is conducted with reference 
to its correlation with Geography, language, and 
other subjects. Field excursions, collecting and 
preserving specimens, and gardening of various 



HEAD AND HANDS TOGETHER 93 

kinds, are prominent features of the courses in 
Nature Study. 

The school offers also through the Academic 
Department, a two-years' course, especially treat- 
ing of the affairs of the farm. Instruction is 
by laboratory work, supplemented by text-books, 
lectures, and reference readings, which are as- 
signed from standard volumes and periodicals. 
The student is brought into close practical contact 
with his subject. He studies farm implements, 
traces root systems of corn and other crops, tests 
germination of seeds, determines the properties of 
soils and the effects of various crops and of rotation 
of crops upon soil fertility. He tests milk, studies 
butter and cheese, and judges a variety of animals. 

The school owns an ample supply of plows, culti- 
vators, planters, cutters, engines, etc. It has ex- 
tensive collections of agricultural plants, seeds and 
products. Laboratories are well equipped with 
apparatus for the study of manures, fertilisers, soil 
bacteriology, germination of seeds, and judging 
cotton and corn. The Institute grounds and the 
fields and orchards of the Experiment Station are 
always available for illustrations in class work. 
Collections of seeds and woods, cabinets of bene- 
ficial and noxious insects, photographs, maps, 
charts, and drawings afford valuable material 
for study and demonstration. Specimens of draft 
and coach horses, Jersey, Ayrshire and Holstein 



94 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

cattle, Southdown sheep, and Berkshire swine, 
afford material for judging. In the Dairy Division 
is a complete outfit for cream separation and 
butter and cheese making. We have, also, levels, 
microscopes, and an extensive list of agricultural 
journals, a complete file of experiment station 
bulletins from all the States, and an excellent assort- 
ment of standard reference books. 

The one purpose is to acquaint the student with 
the facts and principles needed for the improve- 
ment of soils, the increase of fertility, the nature 
of the various crops, the conditions governing 
their successful and economic production, and with 
the general development of agriculture. The stu- 
dent is also made familiar with animals, first, as 
to fitness for specific purposes; second, as to their 
care and management; third, as to their improve- 
ment by breeding ; and fourth, as to the manufacture 
of animal products. He learns the principles of 
orchard management, small fruit culture, vegetable 
gardening and plant propagation, as well as the 
evolution of cultivated plants. A sense of the 
beautiful is cultivated and given expression in flori- 
culture, to the end that more of nature's beauty 
shall pervade the home and its surroundings. 

The work of each year of strictly mental education 
is prescribed. We aim to arouse the students' interest 
in important educational problems, with especial ref- 
erence to the South, rewarding that interest with 



HEAD AND HANDS TOGETHER 95 

practical suggestions ; and to train efficiently teachers 
who will render valuable service in school and 
society. The courses in Normal Education comprise 
a critical study of human nature ; an outline history 
of American education ; general and special methods 
in teaching; and school organisation and adminis- 
tration. The students in these courses observe ex- 
pert teaching in a primary school under the direc- 
tion of the Academic Department. Senior students 
are not only permitted to observ^e, but also to prac- 
tice teaching under supervision. This division of 
Education is being strengthened, and keeps steadily 
before it the fact that Tuskegee is to send out 
teachers as well as trained artisans and industrial 
leaders. 

The courses in Chemistry and in Physics, more 
clearly than any other Academic courses, comple- 
ment the work of the Industrial Department. Thus 
in the course in Chemistry, operations in the shops 
and on the farm, involving chemical reactions, are 
drawn upon as illustrative material for the first 
year's work. The artisan, with a knowledge of 
chemical matters, grows and thinks, and is not 
automatic. The courses are not those in which the 
students arc merely taught how to do, but to do. 
Soap is taken apart and put together. Polishes, 
lacquers, chemical cleansers, are not known merely 
as formulae ; but are actually made in small quanti- 
ties by students themselves, so as to develop their 



96 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

power of doing things. Is this flour, bran, and baking 
powder, pure? Is the fertiliser of high grade? 
How shall the sick-room be disinfected ? How shall 
w^e destroy the cabbage-devouring worm? To 
these and similar questions, the division of Chem- 
istry seeks to enable students readily to find answers. 
In the course in Physics, the principles taken up are 
illustrated by the actual work going on in the outside 
building construction, and the farm work. Great 
stress is laid upon the bearing of Physics on 
tools, machines, and operations of the shops. In- 
spection of the various industrial plants in the 
vicinity of Tuskegee is required in order that the 
student may see the appHcations of Physics to the 
processes in use. Throughout the courses, a note- 
book is accurately kept by each student, in which 
are recorded the results of his observations and 
experiments, together with sketches for illustration. 

An exercise given to one of the Junior classes in 
the night school, not long ago, shows how the 
attempt is made, even in so simple a matter as a 
spelling lesson, to correlate the Academic work with 
the Industrial. 

The theme of this lesson was "Building a Chest," 
and the teacher brought to the class a small chest 
in which were placed most of the tools and materials 
needed in its construction. The teacher exhibited 
each article as he came to it in telHng the story, 
and required the student to spell the word and then 



HEAD AND HANDS TOGETHER 97 

write it on the blackboard as neatly as possible. The 
synonyms and homonyms of some of the words 
were given, and the student required to illustrate 
their difference in spelling and use. 

The teacher proceeded as follows, eliciting from 
the students the words in italics: To build this 
article we must have Timber, such as Pine, or 
Cedar, or Cypress, and other Material. We also 
need several Tools, such as a Plane to Smooth the 
Planks; a Chisel to cut these Dove-tails; and some 
Glue, with which to fasten the pieces together 
substantially, as we shall not need Nails. Then 
with these Sprigs we put on this Moulding, which 
should be cut in a Miter, or we may cut it by this 
Bevel, which can be changed to a Square. We now 
put on these Butts — not Strap-Hinges — with Screws. 
In front must be Bored a hole and the Lock put on ; 
then the Escutcheon over the hole as a finish ; the 
Key is inserted, and we have completed the Chest. 
A Carpenter — one engaged in Carpentry — or a 
Cabinet-Maker, builds things like this, and we call 
him a Mechanic. 

The practical usefulness of the Academic Depart- 
ment lies in the aid which the study of physics and 
chemistry and mathematics and drawing offers to 
the blacksmith, the carpenter, the nurse, and the 
housewife — an aid that does much to transform 
listlessness and drudgery into vivacity and gratify- 
ing efficiency. 



CHAPTER VIII 
Lessons in Home-Making 

While the men must work to get and keep the 
home, the wives and daughters must, in a great 
measure, supply and guard the health, strength, 
morals, and happiness of the family. Their re- 
sponsibility is great in all that makes for the develop- 
ment of the individual and the community. The 
home is built on an ancient foundation among 
the white population of this country, especially 
in the rural communities. The Negro has 
had to learn the meaning of home since he learned 
the meaning of freedom. All w^ork which has to 
do with his uplifting must begin with his home 
and its surroundings. 

Those familiar only with the rural life of the 
North and West, where, even in poverty, there are 
deep-grounded habits of thrift and comfort, do not 
know what home lacks among great masses of the 
cabin-dwellers of the South. Nowhere is there a 
nobler opportunity than that w^hich confronts the 
young women who are learning at Hampton and 
Tuskegee, and other educational institutions, what 
home should be. The crowded one-room cabin 

98 



LESSONS IN HOME-MAKING 99 

affects the moral and physical life of the family, it 
slowly destroys the right inclinations given by 
nature to every child, and develops a manner of 
life which, cooperating with other causes, produces 
mental weakness, loss of ambition, and a shiftless 
disregard of responsibilities. 

It goes without saying that many of the young 
w^omen \vho come to Tuskegee need such training 
as will enable them to make homes that are worthy 
the name. It is the need first at hand, and the 
school tries to meet it in a practical way. The 
most liberal courses in literature and the sciences, 
if they exclude all practical training that will help 
a young woman to solve the problems which center 
around her own hearth, will not help her to get 
what she needs most. 

At Tuskegee she is given a thorough English 
education, she can go out from the school and 
obtain a teacher's position in a field where the 
demand is greater than the supply, but after all 
her duty begins at home, and it would be worse 
than folly to overlook these essentials. It is inter- 
esting to note, in this connection, that, after the 
household training system of Tuskegee had been 
in operation for some time, the need of similar 
education for young women whose natural advant- 
ages were infinitely greater than those of the coloured 
girls in the South, prompted the following announce- 
ment in the advertisement of what is, perhaps, the 



loo WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

most high-priced and exclusive seminary in Massa- 
chusetts : 

"In planning a system of education for young 
ladies, with the view of fitting them for the greatest 
usefulness in life, the idea was conceived of supple- 
menting the purely intellectual work by practical 
training in the art of home management and its 
related subjects. 

"It was the first school of high literary grade to 
introduce courses in Domestic Science into the 
regular curriculum. 

"The results were so gratifying as to lead to the 
equipment of Experiment Hall, a special building, 
fitted for the purpose of studying the principles 
of Applied Housekeeping. Here the girls do the 
actual work of cooking, marketing, arranging 
menus, and attend to all the affairs of a well- 
arranged household. 

" Courses are arranged also in sewing, dressmaking, 
and millinery; they are conducted on a similar 
practical basis, and equip the student with a thorough 
knowledge of the subject." 

A dozen years ago, I do not believe that any such 
announcement would have been made. 

At Tuskegee there is a modest dwelling of four 
rooms, called the "practice cottage." In the 
shadow of the massive brick buildings which sur- 
round it, this cottage seems to have strayed in 
from some one of the country roads around Tus- 




'J 



<5 
■Ji 
■Si 

'A 






II 

i J 



LESSONS IN HOME-MAKING loi 

kegee. But is has a trim and well-kept air, such as 
all country homes can have, no matter how poor 
and simple they may be. It contains a bedroom, 
sitting-room, dining-room and kitchen. These 
rooms are comfortably furnished for family house- 
keeping, but there is nothing in them that is not 
within reach of any Alabama farmer who is able to 
make both ends meet. 

Much of the furniture is home-made. The creton- 
covered chairs, divan, and sofa are made from 
common barrels, which the girls are taught to 
make into furniture in the upholstering department. 
This kind of utility furniture has been so successful 
for ornament and comfort that a good deal of it has 
been ordered by visitors for their Northern homes. 
The floors of the cottage are covered with clean, 
cheap matting and oilcloth, and the students are 
taught to make pretty and serviceable mats from 
corn-husks. Whatever there is in the rooms is in 
good taste, for pictures, wall paper, and humble 
adornment can be worked out in good taste without 
extra cost. 

The girls of the Senior class live in the "practice 
cottage" in turn, four at one time, for periods of 
five weeks. They are able to put into practice, 
under the supervision of Mrs. Washington, much 
that they have learned in their school life of three 
or four years. This is not, in reality, an "experiment 
station," for the girls are thoroughly equipped to 



I02 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

take charge of every department of the house, and 
they run it themselves, being held responsible only 
for results. 

They do the sweeping, dusting, cooking, washing, 
and ironing, sewing if need be, and their own market- 
ing. The family of four is given an allowance of 
not more than three dollars a week for food, which 
they invest at the school store and the school farm. 
With this allowance they are expected to set the 
table for four, and to run their cuisine through the 
week without any outside help. This seems a very 
modest sum, but it is in fair proportion to the 
average incomes of the class of people who need 
just such training. The girls are thoroughly ac- 
quainted with the nutritive and appetising values 
of the foods which will be available in their home 
neighbourhoods. 

Distinguished visitors have been guests of the 
"practice cottage girls," and have enjoyed the 
simple meals, skillfully prepared by the hostesses, 
who make no extra preparations. On their small 
allowance, and with the menu prepared in advance, 
they are able to entertain without flurry or em- 
barrassment. They have been taught that the 
truest hospitality is in making the most of what one 
has to do with, and offering no apologies for the 
absence of luxuries one cannot afford.. The "prac- 
tice cottage" is well kept, and is an interesting 
picture in miniature of the essentially practical 




r-' •- 
3 .^ 






LESSONS IN HOME-MAKING 103 

side of the school gospel of hard work with the hands 
as a part of a useful education. 

Of course, this cottage routine is not allowed to 
interfere with the class work; and while they are 
testing their ability to manage a modest, clean, 
attractive, livable home, the girls are pursuing the 
studies they have selected to fit them for their 
several lines of work after graduation. In addition 
to the training in the Academic Department, these 
girls are learning trades, and, what is more impor- 
tant, how to make homes for themselves or for 
others. In this cottage the Senior girls round out 
their course by the practical application of all the 
theories in household economy that they have learned 
during the earlier years of their training. The 
course in "Domestic Science" is perhaps worth 
outlining in part because it is practical, and is de- 
signed to make the home an uplifting agency by its 
daily operation and influence : 

First year: Making and care of fires; care and 
adjustment of lamps used for cooking; cleaning and 
keeping in order the tables, closets, sinks, and pan- 
tries ; care of material as it comes from market ; wash- 
ing kitchen and cooking dishes, and care of baking- 
bowls, dish- towels, and dish-cloths ; cleaning painted 
and unpainted woodwork ; washing windows, sweep- 
ing and dusting ; the proper use and care of utensils ; 
making breads without yeast ; making biscuit, corn- 
bread, sweet and white potato, graham and oat- 



I04 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

meal bread; muffins of each of the flours, and com- 
binations of rice or grits with them ; making different 
kinds of toast and using stale breads ; cooking vege- 
tables in simple ways. The simplest forms of cooking 
meats; making plain, brown and milk gravies and 
sweet sauces ; cooking cereals and serving in various 
ways ; also cooking fish and eggs. 

Second year: Care of silver, glass, china, brass 
and nickel; care of table linen; laying table for 
different meals, waiting, clearing table and washing 
dishes; cleaning oiled floors; lessons on providing 
material for meals, and calculating cost. Pre- 
paring given menus, and estimating time required 
in preparation; making yeast bread, brown and 
white, rolls, muffins, coffee, spice and raisin bread. 
Soup-making, with and without meat; purees from 
beans, peas and other vegetables, with or without 
milk; stews, hashes, minces. Cleaning and cooking 
chicken in various ways; bacon: boiled, fried. 
Making tea, chocolate, coffee and cocoa. 

The third year deals with the theory of foods, 
their source, selection and composition and economic 
value, and the practice of principles involved in 
dift'ercnt methods of preparation. 

The fourth and final year covers the study of 
dietaries, including the arrangment of bills of fare 
for daily living, in which the expense is limited to 
fifty cents for each person, and dinners of three 
courses for six persons. 



LESSONS IN HOME-MAKING 105 

In the school laundry the young women are 
taught the art of washing and ironing according to 
improved methods. Two washers, an extractor, a 
mangle, starcher, collar and cuff ironer, have been 
added to lighten the drudgery. Drying-rooms and 
ironing - rooms provided with excellent facilities 
afford means for thorough teaching. All of the 
washing for teachers and students, including bed 
and table linen, is done in this department. The 
course covers one school year. 

It is the policy of the Institute to give special 
attention to the training of girls in all matters per- 
taining to dress, health, etiquette, physical culture 
and general housekeeping. The girls are constantly 
under the strict and watchful care of the Dean of 
the Woman's Department and the women teachers. 
Special nales governing the conduct of the girls are 
made known to each girl upon her arrival. In 
addition to the general training, they receive special 
practical talks from various members of the Faculty 
on such matters as relate to the care of the body, 
social purity, etc. 

The course in household training includes such 
instruction as: — The location and sanitation of the 
home. Furniture: its purchase, arrangement, and 
proper care. Surroundings and their advantages. 
Cleaning: lamps, beds, bedrooms, and general 
weekly cleaning. The care of the dining-room: 
serving the table and the care of linen, silver, pantry, 



io6 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

dishes, and towels. The duties and manners of 
the hostess. The furnishing and care of the 
kitchen. Marketing, and economy, punctuaHty, 
and regularity in preparation of food. The sick- 
room: its attractions and proper ventilation. 
Changing the patient's clothing and bedding. 
Feeding and visiting the sick. Yards and out- 
houses: how to keep clean and how to beautify. 
The housekeeper's personal appearance. Dress: 
what to wear and the colors suitable. 

The hospital and training-school for nurses were 
organised to provide for the physical needs of the 
Tuskegee colony, and to equip young women for 
efficient service among their people. A beautiful 
two-story hospital building, with all modem improve- 
ments, has been finished, with enlarged facilities for 
the care of patients. The facilities for the training 
of nurses are excellent and the standard of admission 
high. Graduates from the hospital are doing good 
work, many of them holding excellent positions in 
the hospitals, schools and private infirmaries 
throughout the South. The five Tuskegee nurses 
sent to the front in the Spanish-American war were 
the only coloured female nurses employed by the 
Government. The course of study covers three 
years, but is so arranged that students of excep- 
tional ability are able to complete it in two. 



CHAPTER IX 

Outdoor Work for Women 

Seven years ago I became impressed with the 
idea that there was a wider range of industrial work 
for our girls. The idea grew upon me that it was 
unwise in a climate like ours in the South to narrow 
the work of our girls, and confine them to indoor 
occupations. 

If one makes a close study of economic conditions 
in the South, he will soon be convinced that one of 
the weak points is the want of occupations for 
women. This lack of opportunity grows largely 
out of traditional prejudice and because of lack of 
skill. All through the period of slavery, the idea 
prevailed that women, not slaves, should do as little 
work as possible with their hands. There were 
notable exceptions, but this was the rule. 

Most of the work inside the homes was done 
by the coloured women. Such a thing as cook- 
ing, sewing, and laundering, as part of a white 
woman's education, was not thought of in the 
days of slavery. Training in art, music, and 
general literature was emphasised. When the 
coloured girl became free, she naturally craved the 

107 



io8 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

same education in which she had seen the white 
woman specialising. I have already described our 
trials at the Tuskegee Institute, in attempting to 
get our girls to feel and see that they should secure 
the most thorough education in everything relating 
to the care of a home. When we were able to free 
them of the idea that it was degrading to study and 
practice those household duties which are con- 
nected with one's life every day in the year, I felt 
convinced that one other step was necessary. 

New England and most of the Middle States are 
largely engaged in manufacturing. The factories, 
therefore, naturally give employment to a large 
number of women. The South is not yet in any 
large degree manufacturing territory, but is an agri- 
cultural section and will probably remain such for a 
long period. This fact confirmed my belief that an 
industrial school should not only give training in 
household occupations to women, but should go 
further in meeting their needs and in providing 
education for them in out-of-door industries. 

In making a study of this subject it became evident 
that the climate of every Southern State was pecu- 
liarly adapted to out-of-door work for women. A 
little later I had the opportunity of going to Europe 
and visiting the agricultural college for women at 
Swanley, England. There I found about forty 
women from some of the best families of Great 
Britain, Many of these women were graduates of 



1 



OUTDOOR WORK FOR WOMEN 109 

high schools and colleges. In the morning I saw 
them in the laboratory and class room studying 
botany and chemistry and mathematics as applied 
to agriculture and horticulture. In the afternoon 
these same women were clad in suitable garments 
and at work in the field with the hoe or rake, planting 
vegetable seeds, pruning fruit trees or learning to 
raise poultry and bees and how to care for the dairy. 
After I had seen this work and had made a close 
study of it, I saw all the more clearly what should 
be done for the coloured girls of the South where 
there was so large an unemployed proportion of the 
population. I reasoned that if this kind of hand- 
training is necessary for a people who have back of 
them the centuries of English wealth and culture, 
it is tenfold more needful for a people who are in 
the condition of my race at the South. 

I came home determined to begin the training of 
a portion of our women at Tuskegee in the outdoor 
industries. Mrs. Washington, who had made a care- 
ful study of the work in England, took charge of the 
outdoor work at Tuskegee. At first the girls were 
very timid. They felt ashamed to have any one see 
them at work in the garden or orchard. The young 
men and some of the women were inclined to ridicule 
those who were bold enough to lead off. Not a few 
became discouraged and stopped. There is nothing 
harder to overcome than an unreasonable prejudice 
against an occupation or a race. The more unrea- 



no WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

sonable it is, the harder it is to conquer. Mrs. Wash- 
ington made a careful study of the girls and discov- 
ered the social leaders of a certain group. With this 
knowledge in hand she called the leaders together 
and had several conferences with them and explained 
in detail just what was desired and what the plans 
were. These leaders decided that they would be the 
pioneers in the outdoor work. 

Beginning in a very modest way with a few girls, 
the outdoor work has grown from year to year, 
until it is now a recognised part of the work of the 
school, and the idea that this kind of labour is 
degrading has almost disappeared. In order to 
give, if possible, a more practical idea of just 
what is taught the girls, I give the entire 
course of study. In reading this it should 
be borne in mind that the theory is not only 
given, but in each case the girls have the training 
in actual work. Since the school year opens in 
the fall, the work naturally begins with the indus- 
tries relating to the fall and winter. The course 
of study is: 

First Year. — Fall Term, — Dairying. — The home 
dairy is first taken up, and a detailed knowledge 
of the following facts taught: Kinds, use and care 
of utensils, gravity, creaming. A study of stone, 
wooden, and tin chums, ripening of cream, churning, 
working and salting butter, preparation and mar- 
keting of same. Feeding and care of dairy cows. 



OUTDOOR WORK FOR WOMEN iii 

Poultry Raising. — A working knowledge is re- 
quired of the economic value of poultry on the 
farm, pure and mixed breeds, plain poultry- 
house construction, making of yards, nests, and 

runs. 

Horticulture. — Instruction is given as to the 
importance of an orchard and small fruits, varieties 
best suited, particular locality, selection and prep- 
aration of ground, setting, trimming, extermination 
of borers, lice, etc., special stress being laid upon 
the quality and quantity of peaches, pears, apples, 
plums, figs, grapes, and strawberries that should be 
planted in a home orchard. 

Floriculture and Landscape Gardening. — A study 
of our door-yards, how to utilise and beautify 
them. The kinds, care, and use of tools used in 
floriculture and landscape gardening. Trimming 
and shaping of beds and borders, and the general 
care of shrubbery and flowers. The gathering 
and saving of seed. Special treatment of rose 
bushes and shrubbery. 

Market Gardening. — Importance of proper man- 
agement of the home garden, its value to the home, 
selection and preparation of ground ; kinds, care and 
use of tools, planting, gardening and marketing 
of all vegetables. Gathering of seeds, drying of 
pumpkins, okra, and fruits. 

Live Stock. — Study is limited wholly to ordinary 
farm animals; the number and kind needed, how. 



112 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

when and what to feed; characteristics and utiUty 
of the various animals. 

Winter Term. — Dairying. — The commercial dairy 
is the subject of study, and emphasis is laid upon the 
following: Use of separators, of which the school has 
two leading styles ; churns, feeding, and care of the 
dairy herd, breeds of dairy cattle and their selection, 
butter-making, packing, salting and preparation for 
market. 

Poultry Raising. — Special study of breeding and 
feeding. When, how and what kind of eggs and the 
breed of fowls to set ; the period of incubation, poul- 
try book-keeping, saving of eggs for market; an 
introductory of study of young chickens. 

Floriculture and Landscape Gardening. — Trim- 
ming of beds and borders, mulching, tying, wrapping, 
and preparation of plants for the winter. 

Winter decoration of grounds, the decorative value 
of native shrubbery ; a study of window plants, their 
value in the home, halls and public buildings, their 
economic value, etc. 

Market Gardening. — The selection of grounds and 
making of hotbeds, cold frames, etc., planting and 
managing of same, the raising of winter vegetables, 
marketing. 

Spring Term. — Dairying. — Milking; a study of 
pastures, how to destroy lice and other parasites, the 
care of calves, the utilisation of waste in the dairy; 
laboratory work. 



OUTDOOR WORK FOR WOMEN 113 

Poultry Raising. — A more advanced study of 
young poultry; brooders, sanitation of the house, 
runs, and of all the apparatus; egg-testing, moult- 
ing and its effects upon different breeds. 

Horticulture. — Spring planting, trimming, bud- 
ding, grafting, spraying, care of grape vines; the 
wire and post system of supports; spring layering 
and cuttings. 

Floriculture and Landscape Gardening. — Renew- 
ing of beds and borders, seed sowing, special study 
of propagation by layers, cuttings, division of roots, 
bulbs, etc. ; kinds and uses of fertilisers for this 
special season. 

Market Gardening. — Preparation of ground, what 
and how to plant, special stress being laid upon the 
production of early vegetables for the home and 
market. Reproduction of plants by seeds and by 
division of numbers; water and its office in plant 
economy. 

Live Stock. — Course includes the history, develop- 
ment, characteristics, standard points, utility, adapt- 
ability to climatic conditions; lessons on judging, 
care, selection and management of the leading breeds 
of horses, sheep and hogs. 

Second Year. — Fall Term. — Dairying. — A more 
comprehensive study of milk and its constituents; 
weeds and their harmful effect upon dairy products ; 
general sanitation of dairy bams; the drawing of 
plans, etc. 



114 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

Poultry Raising. — Insecticides, how to make, 
when and how much to use, diseases of fowls and 
their treatment. A study of foods and their adapta- 
bility to different breeds, special study of turkeys 
and guineas. 

Horticulture. — Root and stem grafting with active 
and dormant buds; formation of trunk and top 
starch, and its relation to the hardiness of fruits and 
shrubs, botany of the orchard, entomology; book- 
keeping. 

Floriculture and Landscape Gardening. — System- 
atic botany, bouquet-making — harmony of colour, 
form and size of flowers; laying out of private and 
public grounds, roads, parks, walks, and streets; 
entomology of the flower garden. 

Market Gardening. — Botany of the field and gar- 
den ; physical analysis of soils and the improvement 
of clay and sandy soils; the depletion of plant food 
and its replacement by direct and indirect fertilisers ; 
the source of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. Drain- 
ing. 

Live Stock. — How to hitch and imhitch horses, 
the care of vehicles and harness, how to drive, the 
names of common diseases and treatment of sick 
animals; swine for profit. 

Winter Tenn. — Dairying. — The weighing and 
recording of milk in a commercial dairy; the Bab- 
cock and other methods of testing milk ; composition 
of cheese and its value as a food. 



OUTDOOR WORK FOR WOMEN 115 

Poultry Raising. — Composition of the animal 
body ; a special study of ducks and geese ; brooders, 
ponds, runs, etc., by-products and their value. 

Horticulture. — Forestry, botany, cryptogamic and 
systematic ; nut culture ; preservation of timber, the 
economic value of different woods; the relation of 
forests to climate, water supply, floods and erosion. 

Market Gardening. — A study of the life-history of 
insects, injuries to stored grain, peas, beans, meal, 
Hour, dried fruits; botany of the greenhouse, cold 
frame and hotbeds; the use of thermometers. A 
study of markets, library work. 

Spring Term. — Dairying. — Cottage and Chedder 
cheese-making, scoring of butter, bacteriology of 
milk, butter, and cheese. Judging of dairy animals 
by the score-card method, diseases of cows and their 
treatment; analysis of food stuffs. 

Poultry Raising. — Physical and chemical study 
of foods, library work, fancy breeds, what and how 
to exhibit, the history and development of the 
industry. Heredity and the effects of in-breeding. 

Horticulture. — Origin of new varieties by cross- 
fertilisation, hybrids, sports, atavisms and reversion, 
correlation between plants and animals, rejuvenat- 
ing by pruning, grafting and scraping the bark, 
special diseases of both trees and fruit, and their 
treatment. Knot-growth, blight, gum excrescences 
and frost injuries; drying, preserving, making fruit 
syrups, etc. 



ii6 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

Horticulture and Landscape Gardening. — Special 
designing in cultivated flowers. Origin of new 
species; bees and their relation to the forest and 
garden; the hiving of bees and after-management. 
A study of honey-producing plants; the economic 
value of the honey. 

Market Gardening. — Relation of crops, geology of 
the garden, agricultural chemistry, good roads and 
their relation to the success and value of the farm, 
mineralogy and useful birds and insects. 

I believe that all who will make a careful study of 
the subject will agree with me that there is a vast 
unexplored field for women in the open air. The 
South, with its mild climate and other advantages, 
is as well adapted to out-door labour for women as 
to that for men. There is not only an advantage 
in material welfare, but there is the advantage of a 
superior mental and moral growth. The average 
woman who works in a factory becomes little more 
than a machine. Her planning and thinking is done 
for her. Not so with the woman who depends upon 
raising poultry, for instance, for a living. She must 
plan this year for next, this month for the next. 
Naturally there is a growth of self-reliance, inde- 
pendence, and initiative. 

Life out in the sweet, pure, bracing air is better 
from both a physical and a moral point of view than 
long days spent in the close atmosphere of a factory 
or store. There is almost no financial risk to be 



OUTDOOR WORK FOR WOMEN 117 

encountered, in the South, in following the occu- 
pations which I have enumerated. The immediate 
demands for the products of garden, dairy, poultry- 
yard, apiary, orchard, etc., are pressing and ever 
present. The satisfaction and sense of independence 
that will come to a woman who is brave enough to 
follow any of these outdoor occupations infinitely 
surpass the results of such uncertain labor as that 
of peddling books or cheap jewelry, or similar employ- 
ments, and I believe that a larger number of our 
schools in the near future will see the importance of 
outdoor handwork for women. 

There is considerable significance in the fact that 
this year more than fifty girls have taken up the 
study of scientific farming at the Minnesota College 
of Agriculture, and have thus announced their 
intention to adhere to country hfe. The college 
has been in existence for the past decade, but girls 
have only recently been admitted. The character 
of the instruction available to the girl students is 
suggestive. The course presented emphasises the 
sciences of botany, chemistry, physics and geology, 
requiring, during the freshman and sophomore years 
at least, two terms' work in each of them. Boys 
and girls work together throughout two-thirds of 
the entire course, which includes study in language, 
mathematics, science, civics, and considerable tech' 
nical work. In the courses for girls, cooking, 
laundering and sewing are substituted for carpentry. 



ii8 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

blacksmithing and veterinary science. The girls, 
too, give more attention to household art, home 
economy and domestic hygiene than to the business 
aspect of farming. It is happily the chief purpose 
of the college to awaken in its entire student body 
a keen interest in farming, farm life, the farm-house 
and farm society. Both boys and girls are taught 
to plan farm buildings and to lay out the grounds 
artistically. Considerable attention is given to the 
furnishing of houses, to literature, music and social 
culture, with the general thought of making the farm 
home the most attractive spot on earth. The result 
of the new movement is being watched with keen 
interest by agriculturists and educators. It is 
evident that, should it prove successful, the innova- 
tion will spread to other agricultural States. Its 
influence, one readily apprehends, is apt to be 
social as well as agricultural in character. Hereto- 
fore, one great drawback to farming, even in the 
North, has been the difficulty of keeping the farmers' 
sons on the farm. With trained and educated girls 
enthusiastically taking up the profession of f irming, 
the country life will take on new charms, and the 
exodus of young men to cities will be materially 
lessened. 



CHAPTER X 

Helping the Mothers 

Something about the Woman's Meeting, organised 
and conducted in the town of Tuskegee by Mrs. 
Washington, seems not out of place in this book. 
It is her work, and she has kindly suppHed the 
following outline of the aims and results of this 
attempt to better the conditions and lives 
of the people living in this typical Alabama 
community : 

In the spring of '92, the first Negro Conference 
for farmers was held at Tuskegee. The purpose 
of this conference was to inspire the masses of 
coloured people to secure homes of their own, to 
help them to better ways of living, to insist upon 
better educational advantages for them, and so 
to raise their standards of living, morally, physically, 
intellectually and financially. Sitting in that first 
meeting of Negro farmers and hearing the resolu- 
tions which stood as the platform of the conference, 
I felt that history was repeating itself. In the days 
of Lucretia Mott, and the early struggles of Susan 
B. Anthony, women had no rights that were worth 
mentioning, and, notwithstanding the fact that 

119 



I20 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

there were many women present at this first confer- 
ence, they had httle actual place in it. 

Perhaps they did not realise that they, too, had 
a most prominent part to play in the life which their 
lovers, or their sons and husbands, were urged to 
seek. Perhaps they did not dream that they would 
some day have a vital part in the uplifting of our 
people. This thought would not be stilled: What 
can these poor farmers do with the new ideas, new 
hopes, new aspirations, unless the women can be 
equally inspired and interested in conferences of 
their own? 

Not many days passed before there was a fixed 
purpose in my mind that these women in the homes 
represented by the farmers should be reached. 
How to reach and help them was the question. 
After many weary days and sleepless nights, praying 
for some way to open, the thought came that the 
village of Tuskegee was a good place to begin work. 
The country women, tired of the monotony of 
their lives, came crowding into the village every 
Saturday. There should be a place for them to go 
to be insti-ucted for an hour or more each Saturday. 
Like a flash the idea was caught up, and it was not 
let go until such a place was secured. 

Our first conference was held in the upper story 
of a very dilapidated store which stands on the main 
street of the village. The stairs were so rickety 
that we were often afraid to ascend them. The 



HELPING THE MOTHERS 121 

room was used by the coloured firemen of the village, 
and was a dark and dreary place, uninviting even 
to me. It answered our purpose for the time. We 
had no rent to pay, and that was one less burden 
for us. How to get the women to the first meeting 
was not easily settled. For fear of opposition from 
friends, no mention had been made of the plan, 
except to the man who let me have the room. 

That first Saturday I walked up the stairs alone, 
and sat down in the room with all its utter dreari- 
ness. My heart almost failed me, and not until I 
remembered these words: "No man, having put 
his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the 
Kingdom of God," did I throw off the despondency. 
At this moment a small boy entered the room. I 
said to him, "Go through the streets and say to 
each woman, so that no one else will hear you, 
there is a woman up those stairs who has something 
for you." 

That first meeting I can never forget. There 
were six women who came, and each one as she 
looked at me seemed to say: "Where is it?" 
We talked it all over, the needs of our women, the 
best ways of helping each other, and there was 
begun the first woman's weekly conference, which 
now numbers nearly three hundred women. 

We now have a large, roomy hall on the main 
street, where we come together each Saturday, and 
spend two hours talking of the things which go to 



122 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

make better and truer lives among women and 
children. Women come long distances on foot to 
these meetings. They soon brought with them 
their little girls, whom they could not afford to leave 
at home, and there arose a new question — what 
to do with the children ? A plan was hit upon, and 
a room hired. These girls, now more than fifty in 
number, are taught simple lessons, and, at the same 
time, receive short practical talks on behaviour at 
home, on the streets and elsewhere. We also have 
a small library for them, and each one is allowed to 
draw the books she wants, to keep two weeks or 
longer. We also have picture books on the table 
for the younger children. We are now trying to 
get games for these children and pictures for the 
walls of the room. A friend gives two hours of her 
time on Saturday to these children, and it delights 
one's heart to see the improvement in them in all 
directions, especially in their quiet and becoming 
conduct on the streets. 

The marked improvement among the women in 
the matter of dress has been frequently commented 
upon in the village. They are doing away with 
the wrapping of the hair, and substituting for it 
braiding or some; other simple arrangement. The 
women no longer go barefooted, nor do they sit 
around the streets in a listless way. There is less 
familiarity among the men and women in the 
streets, and in many ways the women are being led 



HELPING THE MOTHERS 123 

into better ways of conduct, to say nothing of home 
improvements and the closer union of family life. 

We visit the homes of the women and see that 
the lessons are put into practice. We have given 
out thousands of papers and picture cards, that 
the cracks might be closed against the wind and rain, 
and that the children of the home might have 
something besides the dark and cheerless logs to 
look at. 

Soon the women began to see the importance of 
these conferences, and to do all in their power to 
promote their interests. Our talks were discussed 
on the farms and in neighbourhood chat. Their 
influence spread in indirect channels. These talks 
were planned along such simple and practical lines 
as the following subjects suggest: 

Morals among young girls. 

The kinds of amusements for young girls. 

A mother's example. 

A mother's duty to her home. 

Dresses for women and children. 

Poultry raising for women. 

The part a woman should take in securing a 
home. 

Fruit canning, etc. 

Many other subjects were suggested by the 
women themselves, and afterward put in written 
form so that they could read them intelligently. 
Many of the talks were grouped in a little book for 



hi 



124 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

women who could not reach the conferences. These 
books contain also little recipes w^hich any woman 
may need in her country home, especially when 
there is sickness in the family. Work for the 
masses is always more difhcult than for the indi- 
vidual, but it is work which must be done. Eighty 
per cent, of our women have their homes in the 
country or on the plantations, they live in the old- 
time log cabins, but they have hearts, they have 
aspirations for the future. In pursuance of the 
ideas which prompted this humble crusade, I have 
sent out leaflets which embody, among others, 
these suggestions for teachers and other workers, 
which I have found exceedingly helpful in organising 
home-union meetings for mothers: 

Decide upon a definite time for holding a meeting^ 
and then send notice to the mothers by the school 
children. 

Once every three or six months have a general 
meeting with simple refreshments such as can be 
gotten in a country village. 

Now and then an experience meeting can be held 
to the advantage of all. Encourage the women to 
talk freely of their own plans. 

Find out by judicious visiting whether any 
advancement is made. 

Do not expect too much in a short time, 
and, above all, do not be dictatorial while 
visiting, or personal in meetings when you wish 



HELPING THE MOTHERS 125 

to deal with mistakes that you have seen in the 
homes visited. 

Some Subjects for Talks 

How to keep home neat and tidy. 

How to make home attractive for husband and 
children. 

Amusements, music and reading in the home 
circle. 

Is it necessary to teach the girls to do good 
by teaching them how to do housework, cooking 
and sewing? 

The relations of mothers to their children. 

How to gain the confidence of children. 

How to correct falsehood and theft among boys 
and girls. 

Is there not a share in the home for the boys ? 

How to teach boys and men to respect women 
generally by teaching them to respect mothers and 
sisters. 

The mother's authority in selecting company for 
her sons and daughters. 

When should a girl be allowed to receive company ? 
How can a mother help her to avoid mistakes as 
regards the young man she loves ? 

What part should a woman take with her husband 
in securing a home or a piece of land on which to 
build one? 

What is the effect upon the face when the hair is 



126 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

wrapped with coloured strings? Why not plat it 
or arrange it in some other becoming way ? 

Should women go barefooted? 

Love of gaudy dress for children. What will the 
result be when they are older and cannot afford to 
buy the same sort? 

Manners on the street. 

Necessity of varying diet for the household. 

Economy in the house as regards food. 

The proper duty of mothers in having the family 
table set with care at the proper time. 

The importance of ventilation, proper food, and 
cleanliness of body on the moral atmosphere of the 
home. 

What lessons can be drawn from Thanksgiving 
Day, New Year's and Christmas? 

The mother's relation to the church and the 
minister. 

How the family should go to church. Isn't it 
better if all go together and sit together, too ? 

How can boys and girls be taught the habit of 
giving to the church and charitable purposes ? 

How may mothers and their daughters best resist 
men who attempt to rob them of their honour and 
virtue ? 

The best way to inspire children to purity of 
thought, speech, and action, at home and abroad ? 

In a leaflet of practical help, for these mothers' 
meetings, some of the simple teachings are put in 



HELPING THE MOTHERS 127 

detail form, and these may give an idea of what we 
are trying to do in these directions, and what are the 
common needs of the people among whom we are 
working. Under the head of "Your Needs" are the 
following items: 

You need chairs in your houses. Get boxes. 
Cover them with bright calico, and use them for 
seats until you can buy chairs. You need plates, 
knives and forks, spoons and table-cloths. Buy 
them with tobacco and snuff money. 

You need more respect for self. Get it by stay- 
ing away from street comers, depots, and, above all, 
excursions. You need to stay away from these 
excursions to keep out of bad company, out of court, 
out of jail, and out of the disgust of every self- 
respecting person. 

You need more race pride. Cultivate this as you 
would your crops. It means a step forward. You 
need a good home. Save all you can. Get your 
own home, and that will bring you nearer citizen- 
ship. You can supply all these needs. When will 
you begin ? Every moment of delay is loss. 

How TO Become Prosperous 

Keep no more than one dog. Stay away from 
court. Buy no snuff, whisky and tobacco. Raise 
your own pork. Raise your own vegetables. Put 
away thirty cents for every dollar you spend. 

Get a good supply of poultry. Set your hens. 



128 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

Keep your chickens until they will bring a good 
price. 

Go to town on Thursday instead of Saturday. 
Buy no more than you need. 

Stay in town no longer than necessary. 

My Daily Work 

I may take in washing, but every day I promise 
myself that I will do certain work for my family. I 
will set the table for every meal. I will wash the 
dishes after every meal. 

Monday I will do my family washing. I will put 
my bedclothes out to air. I will clean the food 
closet with hot water and soap. 

Tuesday I will do my ironing and family patching. 

Wednesday I w411 scrub my kitchen, and clean 
my yard thoroughly. 

Thursday I will clean and air the meal and pork 
boxes. I will scour my pots and pans with soap and 
ashes. 

Friday I will wash my dish-cloth, dish-towels, and 
hand-towels. I will sweep and dust my whole house, 
and clean everything thoroughly. 

Saturday I will bake bread, cake, and do other 
extra cooking for Sunday. I will spend one hour 
in talking with my children, that I may know them 
better. 

Sunday I will go to church and Sunday School. 
I will take my children with me. I will stay at 



HELPING THE MOTHERS 129 

home during the remainder of the day. I will try- 
to read aloud a something helpful to all. 

Questions I Will Pledge Myself to Answer 
AT THE End of the Year 

How many bushels of potatoes, corn, beans, and 
peanuts have we raised this year? 

How many hogs and cows do we keep? How 
much poultry have we raised ? How many bales of 
cotton have we raised? How much have we saved 
to buy a home? 

How much have we done toward planting flowers 
and making our yard look pretty ? How many kinds 
of vegetables did we raise in our home garden? 

How many times did we stay away from miscel- 
laneous excursions when we wished to go? What 
were our reasons for staying at home? Have we 
helped our boys and girls to stay out of bad com- 
pany? What paper have we taken, and have we 
taken our children to church and had them sit 
with us? 

The experiment of real settlement work on a plan- 
tation near Tuskegee was begun in 1896 in a dilapi- 
dated, unused one-room cabin in the quarters of the 
"big house," where resided the last scion of a family 
of slave-holders. 

Seventy-five families lived scattered in cabins over 
the two-thousand-acre plantation in easy access to 



I30 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

their plots of land farmed on shares. Many of the 
men were paying for "time" bought by the owner 
of the plantation. Some had been arrested, and on 
trial found guilty. They had to pay either a certain 
sum or suffer imprisonment. The owner of the 
plantation paid the fines, and the men paid him for 
their time in labour. Schools were miles distant, and 
the only opportunity to teach the better way of life 
seemed to be establishing a settlement. The planter 
graciously granted the free use of the cabin aforesaid. 
Students from the Institute nailed the shingles on the 
open roof. The room was given a thorough cleaning, 
and in a short time a young woman graduate, now 
wife of the Principal of Christianburg Institute, 
Cambria, Virginia, and an undergraduate moved in 
with her home-made furniture — fashioned from dry- 
goods boxes, and covered with pretty chintz sent 
by an old friend who has now passed to her reward. 

As a Sunday School had begun in one of the log 
houses several Sundays previous to the opening of 
the settlement, the young teacher's coming had been 
explained, and all had promised to contribute all 
they could to her support. 

The first articles of food entered on the teacher's 
book to the credit of her patrons were two eggs, one 
can of syrup, one half-pound bacon, one quart meal, 
one can buttermilk. The teacher cooked her meals 
on her oven in the fireplace, did her work, and taught 
school in her cabin. The first day brought fifteen 



HELPING TFIE MOTHERS 131 

boys and girls. Ten of the fathers and mothers, 
eager to learn how to read and write, came to the 
night school. For two years the teacher struggled. 
Her patrons helped her with larder, and grew — 
measuring up to the standards of true living. 

In spite of frequent patchings, the teacher's cabin 
became almost unfit for use. There came a time 
when umbrellas were indispensable in the cabin dur- 
ing a hea\'y downpour. In 1898 a way opened for 
the purchase of ten acres of woodland. A two-room 
cottage was built for the teacher on a clearing. No 
prouder workers could be found than the teacher 
and her pupils in clearing the land for possible crops. 
Beginning with 1900, the average annual yield was 
as follows: Two bales of cotton, forty bushels of 
com, seventy-five bushels sweet potatoes, twenty 
bushels peanuts, twenty bushels pease, four loads 
shucks and fodder, greens, cabbage, and other vege- 
table products. 

Two years ago a kitchen was added to the cottage, 
and the cooking classes of the school arose to the 
dignity of having a real stove and other necessaries. 
Sewing, cooking, gardening, and housekeeping classes 
have succeeded wonderfully. The boys of the set- 
tlement have received first prizes from Tuskegee 
Institute Agricultural Fair for their products put on 
exhibition. 

One of the first fruits of the settlement work has 
been the promotion of a boy from that school to 



132 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

Tuskegee Institute. He has stood the test of four 
years in his classes, industrial and academic, and is 
now most promising. 

The second step to place the work on a hopeful 
basis has been the purchase of ten more acres of 
land. A two-room cottage has been built recently, 
and the mother of the first settlement boy to come 
to the front, and one of our pioneer workers in the 
venture, has been given a chance to not only earn 
her living, but to serve as a native object-lesson of 
neatness in her home and surroundings. Eight years 
of constant work teaching old and young how to 
live has resulted in better built homes on the planta- 
tion. Owner has replaced one-room log cabins with 
two-room cottages. 

House to house visits and the object-lesson of the 
settlement work have told for good in the matter 
of cleanHness. The marriage tie is respected. It is 
the exception rather than the rule to find unmarried 
mothers living with their children's fathers without 
even a sense of shame. 

The barefoot boys and girls, men and women, who 
first attended the settlement Sunday School eight 
years ago, come neatly dressed. Men and women 
who could not read or write in the beginning of 
the work can read their Sunday School lessons and 
write a presentable note in a matter of business. 

The Mothers' Union has brought the mothers to 
see the deep necessity of exerting their influence for 



HELPING THE MOTHERS 133 

good of home and people. The penny savings bank 
held by the teacher represents stockholders that 
mean to be owners of their own homes. 

In the night school, the grown people, who are 
employed during the day, are taught the simple les- 
sons which were neglected in their youth. At first 
many of them were ashamed to admit their igno- 
rance. One young man, whom Mrs. Washington 
noticed during one of her visits as being particularly 
sullen when asked to join the class, has turned out 
to be one of the most ambitious pupils. "At first 
I was almost afraid to speak to him," she said, "but 
after I talked to him a little while, he broke down 
quite suddenly, and exclaimed: 

" Oh, Mis' Washington ! I'se so ashamed, I don't 
even know my letters." But it is the classes in 
cooking and cleaning and sewing which have been 
most successful, and these are responsible more than 
anything else for the change in the women. 

From the outset, the white planters who employ 
most of the coloured families of the settlement have 
aided in the work. When Mrs. Washington first 
sent for permission to carry on some missionary work 
among his tenants, he sent a boy on a mule with a 
fat turkey, and a message for me to "come and do 
anything I liked. ' ' What seemed to be a discourage- 
ment at first was that occasionally a family moved 
away, thus causing the teacher to begin all over 
again, with a newcomer, the work which had been 



134 WORKING WITH THE HANPS 

scarce finished with the old. Later she came to see 
that those who migrated served to spread the influ- 
ence into other neighbourhoods, thus broadening 
the teachings far beyond her own limitations. 



CHAPTER XI 
The Tillers of the Ground 

There is held at the Tuskegee Institute every 
year a remarkable conference of Negro workers, 
mostly farmers, who are to work out their salvation 
by the sweat of their brows in tilling the soil of the 
South. The purpose of these gatherings is severely 
practical — to encourage those who have not had the 
advantages of training and instruction, and to give 
them a chance to learn from the success of others as 
handicapped as they what are their own possibilities. 
As I have said many times, it is my conviction that 
the great body of the Negro population must live in 
the future as they have done in the past, by the cul- 
tivation of the soil, and the most hopeful service now 
to be done is to enable the race to follow agriculture 
with intelligence and diligence. 

I have just finished reading a little pamphlet writ- 
ten by Mr. George W. Carver, Director of the Agri- 
cultural Department at Tuskegee, giving the results 
of some of his experiments in raising sweet potatoes 
for one year. This coloured man has shown in plain, 
simple language, based on scientific principles, how he 
has raised two hundred and sixty-six bushels of sweet 

135 



1^,6 WORKING WITPI THE HANDS 



J 



potatoes on a single acre of common land, and made 
a net profit of one hundred and twenty-one dollars. 
The average yield of sweet potatoes to the acre, in the 
part of the South where this experiment was tried, 
is thirty-seven bushels per acre. This coloured man 
is now preparing to make this same land produce 
five hundred bushels of potatoes. 

I have watched this experiment with a great deal 
of pleasure. The deep interest shown by the neigh- 
bouring white farmers has been most gratifying. I 
do not believe that a single white farmer who visited 
the field to see the unusual yield ever thought of hav- 
ing any prejudice or feeling against this coloured man 
because his education had enabled him to make a 
marked success of raising sweet potatoes. There 
were, on the other hand, many evidences of respect 
for this coloured man and of gratitude for the infor- 
mation which he had furnished. 

If we had a hundred such coloured men in each 
county in the South, who could make their education 
felt in meeting the world's needs, there would be no 
race problem. But in order to get such men, those 
interested in the education of the Negro must begin 
to look facts and conditions in the face. Too great 
a gap has been left between the Negro's real condition 
and the position for which we have tried to fit him 
through the medium of our text-books. We have 
overlooked in many cases the fact that long ^'•ears of 
experience and discipline are necessary for any race 



THE TILLERS OF THE GROUND 137 

before it can get the greatest amount of good out of 
the text-books. Much that the Negro has studied 
presupposes conditions that do not, for him, exist. 

The weak point in the past has been that no 
attempt has been made to bridge the gap between the 
Negro's educated brain and his opportunity for sup- 
plying the wants of an awakened mind. There has 
been almost no thought of connecting the educated 
brain with the educated hand. It is almost a crime to 
take young men from the farm, or from farming dis- 
tricts, and educate them, as is too often done, in 
everything except agriculture, the one subject with 
which they should be most familiar. The result is 
that the young man, instead of being educated to 
love agriculture, is educated out of sympathy with it ; 
and instead of returning to his father's farm after 
leaving college, to show him how to produce more 
with less labour, the young man is often tempted to 
go into the city or town to live by his wits. 

The purpose of the Tuskegee Negro Conference is 
to help the farmers who are too old, or too bound 
down by their responsibilities, to attend schools or 
institutes ; to do for them, in a small way, what Tus- 
kegee and other agencies seek to do for the younger 
generation. Coloured men and women make long and 
expensive journeys to be present, coming from all 
the Southern and several of the Northern states. 
They have found that their money is not wasted, for 
they learn much by seeing what has been done at the 



138 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

school, from the advice of experts, but more 
especially by the exchange of opinions and by 
comparing experiences in their own field of work. 
These meetings are not for whining or complaints. 
Their keynote is hopeful courage. To look up 
and not down, forward and not backward, to be 
cheerful and mutually helpful, is the golden rule of 
the conference. 

It was decided from the first to confine the pro- 
ceedings to matters which the race had closely 
within its own control, and to positive, aggressive 
effort, rather than to mere negative criticisms and 
recitations of wrongs. I wanted these coloured 
farmers and their wives to consult about the 
methods and means of securing homes , of freeing them- 
selves from debt, of encouraging intelligent produc- 
tion, of paying their taxes, of cultivating habits of 
thrift, honesty and virtue, of building school-houses, 
and securing education and high Christian character, 
of cementing the friendships between the races. 

In these conventions, as in other ways, we have 
tried to keep alive the feeling of hope and encour- 
agement. We have seen darker days than these, 
and no race that is patient, long-suffering, indus- 
trious, economical, and virtuous, no race that is per- 
sistent in efforts that make for progress, no race 
that cultivates a spirit of good-will toward all man- 
kind, is left without reward. 

The Farmers' Conference each year adopts a 



THE TILLERS OF THE GROUND 139 

declaration of principles, which sum up its objects 
in such words as these : 

"Our object shall be to promote the moral, mate- 
rial, and educational progress of this entire com- 
munity. Believing, as we do, that we are our own 
worst enemies, we pledge, here and now, from this 
time forth, to use every effort — 

"To abolish and do away with the mortgage sys- 
tem just as rapidly as possible. 

" To raise our food supplies, such as corn, potatoes, 
syrup, pease, hogs, chickens, etc., at home rather 
than to go in debt for them at the store. 

"To stop throwing away our time and money on 
Saturdays by standing around towns, drinking and 
disgracing ourselves in many other ways. 

" To oppose, at all times, the excursion and camp- 
meeting, and to try earnestly to secure better 
schools, better teachers, and better preachers. 

"To try to buy homes, to urge upon all Negroes 
the necessity of owning homes and farms, and not 
only to own them, but to beautify and improve 
them. 

"Since the greater number of us are engaged in 
agriculture, we urge the importance of stock and 
poultry raising, the teaching of agriculture in the 
country schools, the thorough cultivation of a small 
acreage, rather than the poor cultivation of a large 
one, attention to farm -work in winter, and getting 
rid of the habit of living in one-room houses. 



T40 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

"We urge more protection to life and property, 
better homes for tenants, and that home life in the 
country be made more attractive, all this with the 
view of keeping such great numbers of our people 
out of the large cities. 

"In connection with the better schools and 
churches, we emphasise the need of careful atten- 
tion to the morals of our ministers and teachers, and 
all others acting in the capacity of leaders. 

"Prosperity and peace are dependent upon 
friendly relations between the races, and to this end 
we urge a spirit of manly forbearance and mutual 
interest." 

What these conferences are doing, and what sort 
of people are coming to them every year, may be 
gathered from some of their experiences as they have 
told them themselves during their visit to Tuskegee. 
Some of the best things are said by men and women 
who have succeeded in working their way up from 
abject poverty to comfortable independence. There 
is no better antidote for the foolish talk so often 
heard about the inevitable shiftlessness of the Negro 
race than these short and pithy narratives of sacrifice, 
struggle and achievement. A Florida man said that 
he had six dollars when he married. He now owns 
two hundred acres and a home of seven rooms. " I 
did without most everything until I got it paid for," 
he explained. He has fifty-seven head of cattle, six 
work horses, and five colts, all raised by himself. 



THE TILLERS OF THE GROUND 141 

Is it dangerous to give the ballot to that kind of a 
citizen ? Will he be apt to use it to promote extrav- 
agant taxation? 

An Alabama farmer said : 

" I own sixty-seven acres of land. I got it by 
working hard and living close. I did not eat at any 
big tables. I often lived on bread and milk. I have 
five rooms to my house. I started with one, and that 
was made of logs. I add a room every year. I was 
lucky in marrying a woman whose father gave her a 
cow. I ain't got no fine clock or organ. I did once 
own a buggy, but it was a shabby one, and now we 
ride in a wagon, or I go horse-back on a horse I 
raised that is worth two hundred and fifty dollars. 
I have seven children in school." 

" I started plowing with my pants rolled up and 
barefoot," said a Georgia man. "I saved five hun- 
dred dollars and bought a home in Albany, Georgia. 
I bought two hundred acres for seven dollars an acre, 
and paid for it in three years. I made that pay for 
two hundred acres more. After awhile I bought 
thirteen hundred acres. I live on it, and it is all paid 
for. I have twenty-five buildings and they all came 
out of my pocketbook. That land is now worth 
twenty-five dollars an acre. For a distance of four 
or five miles from my settlement, there has not been 
a man in the chain-gang for years. I work forty- 
seven head of mules. The only way we will ever 
be a race is by getting homes and living a virtuous 



142 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

life. I don't give mortgages. I take mortgages on 
black and white. I have put the first bale of cotton 
on the market in Georgia every year for eight 
years." 

A widow from Alabama told her story, which 
shows among other things how a dog may be useful : 

" There are three in my family, and I am the boss. 
I save about a hundred dollars a year. I give no 
mortgages. I plant everything that a farmer can 
plant. I raise my own syrup, meat, pease, com, and 
everything we need to eat. I have three cows. 
You have got to go low dow^n to get up high. I 
traded a little puppy with my brother for a pig. 
From this one pig I raised eight pigs, and for seven 
years I have not bought a pound of meat. I am 
living on the strength of that little puppy yet. I 
own forty acres, and sometimes rent more land." 

A coloured minister from Alabama said that he 
farmed as well as preached. He was a renter for 
seven years. In nine years he paid for four hundred 
acres, and now owns ten hundred and fifteen acres. 
He raises horses, cows, mules, and hogs and has fifty 
persons dependent upon him. He owns the land 
where he used to live as a renter, and lives in the 
house of the man from whom he rented. There are 
few white people in his neighbourhood. Most of 
the coloured people own their own homes, and they 
have lengthened the anntial school term two months 
at their own expense. This man said that, when he 



THE TILLERS OF THE GROUND 143 

first bought land, he spht rails to fence it during the 
day and carried them around at night, and his wife 
built the fence. 

A South Carolinian, who was never before so far 
from home, said that he was a slave for twenty 
years. " I used to work six days for my master, and 
Sunday for myself," he said. "God introduced ten 
commandments, but our people have added another, 
'Thou shalt not work Saturdays or Sundays, either.' 
I stick to the Ten Commandments and put in six days 
a week, and in that way have bought three hundred 
acres and paid for it. I have a large house for my 
own family of ten, and fourteen other buildings on 
the place, six of them rented. No man is a farmer 
excepting the man who lives on the produce of his 
farm." 

A visitor from Louisiana told how he had bor- 
rowed two hundred and fifty dollars from his father 
and bought twenty-five acres of land in 1877. He 
used to begin work at four o'clock in the morning. 
For a year his wife ground all their meal, three ears 
at a time, in a small hand-mill. Now he owns three 
hundred acres of sugar land, worth a hundred dollars 
an acre, and has twenty-seven white and forty-eight 
coloured people working for him. 

" I would like to set a big table for you," said one 
of these farmers whom I visited at his home, "but, 
professor, you-all is teachin' us to 'conermise an' 
save, an' dats what I'se tryin' to do." When you 



144 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

remember how anxious the good farmers and their 
wives are ahvays to set a good table for the visiting 
"professors" and "revrums," this man had a good 
deal of courage in departing from old customs. 

I say to the farmers : "If feeding the ' binitherins ' 
is a strain on you, feed no more of them. Cut down 
on all expenses that can be trimmed without injury 
to yourself. 

One woman from Bullock County, Alabama, car- 
ried away the true spirit of the conference. Not 
long ago, one of our agents saw a deed to a valuable 
piece of farm land, bought with money she had saved 
by selling cows. She said that she had never thought 
of any such plan until she had visited the Farmers' 
Conference and heard others tell how they had 
bought land. An unusual feature of this case was 
that the w^oman did not live in the town in which 
she had invested her money. She had made her- 
self interested enough to seek a chance to invest her 
earnings in the purchase of property several miles 
from her home settlement. She said that it required 
a mighty sight of will-power to keep from buying 
fine clothes with the money, but she was determined 
to get hold of some land, and she did it without any 
assistance from her husband. 

"Yes, of course I'll be at the next Negro Confer- 
ence," wrote another farmer, "I want you to give 
me a chance to talk, too. I want to show Mr. Wash- 
ington a turnip I raised in my own garden, and have 



THE TILLERS OF THE GROUND 145 

been saving for the Conference, and I want to tell him 
how much I have raised and eaten out of my own 
garden, and how much I have saved as the result of 
these teachings at the annual meetings." 

Another wrote recently: 

" I have to buy very little to eat, for I raise with 
one horse all I want to eat, and a little more besides. 
Last year I raised nine bales of cotton, plenty of 
com, sugar cane, pease, and potatoes, and many 
other things. Besides this, my wife raised twenty 
hogs, and a yard full of chickens, geese and turkeys. 
The only way for the farmer to get out of debt and 
keep out of debt is to buy a home, raise what he eats, 
and pay at once for what he gets out of the store." 

A pilgrim from Georgia thus expressed himself : 

" I came here to get my keg full of good news and 
glad tidings to carry back to Georgia, and I have got 
it. I began working for myself when I was eighteen 
years old. My father and mother died when I was 
a child. I first worked for eight dollars and fifty 
cents a month and my board, and cleared eighty- 
three dollars the first year. Then I worked on 
shares for a while, then I bought a mule on credit, 
using my money to support myself while raising a 
crop. Now I own fifteen hundred acres of land, all 
paid for. I have six rooms in my house. I don't 
give any mortgages. I have twenty-three plows, 
and a bank account. I haul on my drays about ten 
thousand bales of cotton every year for the planters 



146 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

in my county. I have another patch of fifty acres 
near Fort Gaines on which there is a six-room house." 

" We come here to learn wisdom and knowledge," 
said a man from Macon County, Alabama. " I had 
a part of the slavery time, and I've had all of the 
freedom time. When I was in my eighteenth year 
I wanted to marry the worst way. I did it some- 
how, and then we tried every plan to get ahead in 
the world. I worked Sunday as well as Monday. 
I even hitched myself to the plow, and my wife 
plowed me. Now I have got horses, mules, com, and 
plenty of everything to do me, but I have not got 
any home. Next year when I come here I am going 
to own a place of my own instead of renting it." 

Scores of similar illustrations could be quoted to 
show that the Negro farmer is fighting his own bat- 
tles, and that in his annual visits to Tuskegee he 
preaches, both to the students and to his fellow toil- 
ers, the gospel of work with the hands as the path- 
way to freedom. The kind of practical advice dis- 
tributed among these farmers is illustrated in the 
following specimen of the leaflets issued by our 
"Bureau of Nature Study for Schools." This one 
on Hints and Suggestions for Farmers has to do with 
the ever- vital question of "Mortgage Lifting": 

"Farmers all over the Cotton Belt are now finish- 
ing their plans for the growing of this year's crop. 
All sorts of financial plans have been made. Per- 
haps the most common among our farmers is the 



THE TILLERS OF THE GROUND 147 

credit plan or crop mortgage. In this the farmer 
binds himself and family to make a crop, usually cot- 
ton, for any one who will 'advance' him what he 
must buy while growing the crop. He agrees to pay 
interest, ranging from ten to thirty-five per cent, on 
the cost of the things furnished. Thus a pair of 
shoes which would sell for $1.50 in cash would cost 
about $2 in the fall. If allowed to run until the next 
Fall, it would cost him about $2.50. If allowed to 
run three years, it would take $3 . 1 5 to pay for a $ i . 50 
pair of shoes. If carried the fourth year, it would 
take $4, and one year more would call for $5 . 

"Too many farmers are paying $5 for shoes which 
would have cost them only $1.50 if they had man- 
aged their business properly. Too many times the 
$5 shoes are never paid for, leaving an unkindly 
feeling between the 'advancer' and the one 'ad- 
vanced,' causing the landlord and tenant, and very 
often the merchant, to suffer. 

"Yet the farmer must have clothing. He must 
have plows, hoes, wagons, etc. No man who tills 
the soil should have to suffer for something to eat. 
Perhaps no one will question the farmer's right to 
make the crop mortgage. He must and ought to 
have plenty of good, wholesome food to make it pos- 
sible for him to do his work well. But for his own 
good, the good of his family, for the good of the land- 
lord, and the community in which he lives, we do dis- 
pute his right to manage business as, many of our 



148 WORKING WITH , THE HANDS 

farmers do. He should not make a mortgage he 
cannot easily lift. 

" If it requires $i 50 to supply a farmer for a season, 
at the end of that season his debt will be about $180 — 
an extra $30, the average value of a bale of cotton, 
to do a credit business. If it requires $75 to carry 
him, he will owe about $90, costing him half a bale 
of cotton to do a credit business. Now, do you note 
that the smaller the amount borrowed, the smaller 
the amount of interest, and the easier it becomes for 
the farmer to lift the whole thing? Don't load so 
heavily. Put two thousand pounds on a thousand- 
pound wagon and see what becomes of you, your 
load, and your wagon. One man tries by main 
strength to lift a large load. He fails and gives up 
in despair. Another man gets a long pole, or lever, 
and with the greatest ease raises and places the load 
where it is wanted. The first uses only muscle, 
while the last mixes muscle with brains. 

"Could we not say the same thing of the unsuc- 
cessful and the successful mortgage Hfter? If you 
will use your head and go at that debt in the right 
way, you will be surprised with what great ease you 
can get it out of the way. Well, how can this be 
done, one man asks ? What would you advise ? A 
wise man listens to advice. If he thinks it good, he 
will try to follow it. The farmer who is in debt 
must — 

" Not make bad bargains. He must work all day 



THE TILLERS OF THE GROUND 149 

and sometimes part of the night, and buy only what 
he is compelled to have. He should raise every- 
thing he eats and a little more, and then cultivate 
as much cotton as he can. 

"Some of the farmers buy shoddy goods at fair 
prices. They allow the boys and girls to buy cheap 
jewelr}^ They buy a sewing machine on credit for 
fifty or sixty dollars, and when they get it paid for, 
if they ever do, it has cost about a hundred dollars. 
They pay ten and fifteen dollars for a washstand and 
bureau when an upholstered box would do for the 
present. The industrious farmer works from sun- 
rise to sunset every day in the week. If there is 
some light work he can do by putting in two or three 
hours during the long winter nights, you find him at 
it. It takes this to lift the mortgage. 

"The sensible farmer will not buy five hundred 
pounds of bacon if there is any way to get along with 
two hundred and fifty. If he must buy it on credit, 
he will eat butter, drink milk, raise and eat eggs and 
chickens, kill a young beef when he can, and dry or 
pickle it, so as to supply his wants from his own 
produce as long as possible. 

"The farmer who wants to get out of debt will 
have large patches of greens, his garden will have 
something growing in it the year round. His table 
will be loaded with wild fruits, such as blackberries, 
huckleberries, plums, etc. His potatoes will keep 
him from buying so much corn meal and flour on 



150 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

credit. He plans to raise more than enough com, 
oats, and wheat to do him another year. Then he 
makes that cotton crop count. He gathers e very- 
lock of it as fast as it opens and tries to sell it for 
every cent it is worth. He walks up like a man and 
pays every cent he owes when it falls due. Then his 
neighbours, both white and coloured, learn to respect 
him because he is an honest man, he owes nobody, 
his store-house, smoke-house, and barn are loaded 
with fruits, and home-made produce. He is a happy 
man because that mortgage is lifted." 



CHAPTER XII 
Pleasure and Profit of Work in the Soil 

I HAVE always been intensely fond of outdoor 
life. Perhaps the explanation for this lies partly 
in the fact that I was born nearly out-of-doors. I 
have also, from my earliest childhood, been very 
fond of animals and fowls. When I was but a 
child, and a slave, I had many close and interesting 
acquaintances with animals. 

During my childhood days, as a slave, I did not 
see very much of my mother, as she was obliged 
to leave her children very early in the morning to 
begin her day's work. Her early departure often 
made the matter of my securing breakfast uncertain. 
This led to my first intimate acquaintance with 
animals. 

In those days it was the custom upon the planta- 
tion to boil the Indian corn that was fed to the 
cows and pigs. At times, when I had failed to get 
any other breakfast, I used to go to the places 
where the cows and pigs were fed, and share their 
breakfast with them, or else go to the place where it 
was the custom to boil the com, and get my morning 
meal there before it was taken to the animals. 



152 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

If I was not there at the exact moment of feeding, 
I could still find enough corn scattered around the 
fence or the trough to satisfy me. Some people may 
think that this was a pretty bad way to get one's 
food, but, leaving out the name and the associations, 
there was nothing very bad about it. Any one 
who has eaten hard boiled corn knows that it has 
a delicious taste. I never pass a pot of boiled corn 
now without yielding to the temptation to eat a 
few grains. 

Another thing that assisted in developing my 
fondness for animals was my contact w^th the 
best breeds of fowls and animals w^hen I was a 
student at the Hampton Institute. Notwithstanding 
that my work there was not directly connected 
with the stock, the mere fact that I saw the best 
kinds of animals and fowls day after day increased 
my love for them, and made me resolve that when 
I went out into the world I would have some as 
nearly like those as possible. 

I think that I owe a great deal of my present 
strength and capacity for hard work to my love of 
outdoor life. It is true that the amount of time 
that I can spend in the open air is now very limited. 
Taken on an average, it is perhaps not more than 
an hour a day, but I make the most of that hour. 
In addition to this, I get much pleasure out of 
looking forward to and planning for that hour. 

I do not believe that any one who has not worked 



PLEASURE AND PROFIT OF WORK 153 

in a garden can begin to understand how much 
pleasure and strength of body and mind and soul 
can be derived from one's garden, no matter how 
small it may be, and often the smaller it is the better. 
If the garden be ever so limited in area, one may 
still have the gratifying experience of learning how 
much can be produced on a little plot carefully 
laid out, thoroughly fertilised, and intelligently 
cultivated. And then, though the garden may be 
small, if the flowers and vegetables prosper, there 
springs up a feeling of kinship between the man 
and his plants, as he tends and watches the growth 
of each individual fruition from day to day. Every 
morning brings some fresh development, born of 
the rain, the dew, and the sunshine. 

The letter or the address you began writing the 
day before never grows until you return and take 
up the work where it was left off; not so with the 
plant. Some change has taken place during the 
night, in the appearance of bud, or blossom, or 
fruit. This sense of newness, of expectancy, brings 
to me a daily inspiration whose sympathetic sig- 
nificance it is impossible to convey in words. 

It is not only a pleasure to grow vegetables for 
one's table, but I find much satisfaction, also, in 
sending selections of the best specimens to some 
neighbour whose garden is backward, or to one who 
has not learned the art of raising the finest or the 
earliest varieties, and who is therefore surprised to 



154 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

receive new potatoes two weeks in advance of any 
one else. 

When I am at my home in Tuskegee, I am able, 
by rising early in the morning, to spend at least 
half an hour in my garden, or with my fowls, pigs, 
or cows. Whenever I can take the time, I like to 
hunt for the new eggs each morning myself, and 
when at home I am selfish enough to permit no one 
else to make these discoveries. As with the growing 
plants, there is a sense of freshness and restfulness 
in the finding and handling of newly laid eggs that 
is delightful to me. Both the anticipation and the 
realisation are most pleasing. I begin the day by 
seeing how many eggs I can find, or how many 
little chickens are just beginning to peep through 
the shells. 

Speaking of little chickens coming into life reminds 
me that one of our students called my attention to 
a fact connected w4th the chickens owned by the 
school which I had not previously known. When 
some of the first little chickens came out of their 
shells, they began almost immediately to help others, 
not so forward, to break their way out. It was 
delightful to me to hear that the chickens raised at 
the school had, so early in life, caught the Tuskegee 
spirit of helpfulness toward others. 

I am deeply interested in the different kinds of 
fowls, and, aside from the large number grown by 
the school in its poultry house and yards, I grow at 




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a. ■r- 
Z'Ji 

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PLEASURE AND PROFIT OF WORK 155 

my own home common chickens, Plymouth Rocks, 
Buff Cochins, and Brahmas, Peking ducks, and fan- 
tailed pigeons. 

The pig, I think, is my favourite animal. In 
addition to some common-bred pigs, I keep a few 
Berkshires and some Poland Chinas; and it is a 
pleasure to me to watch their development and 
increase from month to month. Practically all the 
pork used in my family is of my own raising. 

I heard not long ago a story of one of our graduates 
which delighted me as an illustration of the real 
Tuskegee spirit. A man had occasion to go to the 
village of Benton, Alabama, in which Mr. A. J. 
Wood, one of our graduates, had settled ten years 
before, and gone into business as a general merchant. 
In this time he has built up a good trade and has 
obtained for himself a reputation as one of the best 
and most reliable business men in the place. While 
the visitor was there, he happened to step to the 
open back door of the store, and stood looking out 
into a little yard behind the building. The merchant 
joining him there, began to call, "Ho, Boy. Ho, 
Boy," and finally, in response to this calling, there 
came crawling out from beneath the store, with 
much grunting, because he was altogether too big 
to get comfortably from under the building, an 
enormous black hog. 

"You see that hog," the man said. "That's my 
hog. I raise one like that every year as an object- 



156 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

lesson to the coloured farmers around here who 
come to the store to trade. About all I feed him is 
the waste from the store. When the fanners come 
in here, I show them my hog, and I tell them that 
if they would shut their pigs up in a pen of rails, 
and have the children pick up acorns in the woods 
to feed them on, they might have just such hogs as 
I do, instead of their razor-backs running around 
wild in the woods. 

"Perhaps I can't teach a school here," the man 
added, "but if I can't do that, I can at least teach 
the men around here how to raise hogs as I learned 
to raise them at Tuskegee." 

In securing the best breeds of fowls and animals 
at Tuskegee, I have the added satisfaction of seeing 
a better grade of stock being gradually introduced 
among the farmers who live near the school. 

After I have gathered my eggs, and have at 
least said "Good morning" to my pigs, cows, and 
horse, the next morning duty — no, I will not say 
duty, but delight — is to gather the vegetables for 
the family dinner. No pease, no turnips, radishes 
nor salads taste so good as those which one has 
raised and gathered with his own hands in his own 
garden. In comparison with these all the high- 
sounding dishes found in the most expensive restau- 
rants seem flavourless. One feels, when eating his 
own fresh vegetables, that he is getting near to the 
heart of nature; not a second-hand stale imitation, 



PLEASURE AND PROFIT OF WORK 157 

but the genuine thing. How delightful the change, 
after one has spent weeks eating in restaurants or 
hotels, and has had a bill of fare pushed before his 
eyes three times a day, or has heard the familiar 
sound for a month from a waiter's lips: "Steak, 
pork chops, fried eggs, and potatoes." 

As I go from bed to bed in the garden, gathering 
my lettuce, pease, spinach, radishes, beets, onions 
and the relishes with which to garnish the dishes, 
and note the growth of each plant since the previous 
day, I feel a nearness and kinship to the plants 
which makes them seem to me like members of my 
own family. When engaged in this work, how short 
the half-hour is, how quickly each minute goes, 
bringing nearer the time when I must go to my 
office. When I do go there it is with a vigour and 
freshness and with a steadiness of nerve that pre- 
pares me thoroughly for what perhaps is to be a 
difficult and trying day — a preparation impossible, 
except for the half -hour spent in my garden. 

All through the day I am enabled to do more 
work and better work because of the delightful 
anticipation of another half-hour or more in my 
garden after the office work is done. I get so much 
pleasure out of this that I frequently find myself 
beseeching Mrs. Washington to delay the dinner 
hour that I may take advantage of the last bit of 
daylight for my outdoor work. 

My own experience in outdoor life leads me to 



158 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

hope that the time will soon come when there will 
be a revolution in our methods of educating children, 
especially in the schools of the smaller towns and 
rural districts. I consider it almost a sin to take a 
number of children whose homes are on farms, and 
whose parents earn their living by farming, and 
cage them up, as if they were so many wild beasts, 
for six or seven hours during the day, in a close 
room where the air is often impure. 

I have known teachers to go so far as to frost the 
windows in a school-room, or have them made high 
up in the w^all, or keep the window curtains down, 
so that the children could not even see the wonderful 
world without. For six hours the life of these 
children is an artificial one. The apparatus which 
they use is, as a rule, artificial, and they are taught 
in an artificial manner about artificial things. 
Even to whisper about the song of a mocking-bird 
or the chirp of a squirrel in a near-by tree, or to 
point to a stalk of corn or a wild flower, or to speak 
about a cow and her calf, or a little colt and its 
mother grazing in an adjoining field, are sins for 
which they must be speedily and often severely 
punished. I have seen teachers keep children 
caged up on a beautiful, bright day in June, when 
all Nature was at her best, making them learn — or 
try to learn — a lesson about hills, or mountains, or 
lakes, or islands, by means of a map or globe, when 
the land surrounding the school-house was alive 



PLEASURE AND PROFIT OF WORK 159 

and beautiful with the images of these things. I 
have seen a teacher work for an hour with children, 
trying to impress upon them the meaning of the 
words lake, island, peninsula, when a brook not a 
quarter of a mile away would have afforded the 
little ones an opportunity to pull off their shoes and 
stockings and wade through the water, and find, not 
one artificial island or lake, on an artificial globe, 
but dozens of real islands, peninsulas, and bays. 
Besides the delight of wading through the water, 
and of being out in the pure bracing air, they would 
learn by this method more about these natural 
divisions of the earth in five minutes than they 
could learn in an hour in books. A reading lesson 
taught out on the green grass under a spreading oak 
tree is a lesson needing little effort to hold a boy's 
attention, to say nothing of the sense of delight and 
relief which comes to the teacher. 

I have seen teachers compel students to puzzle 
for hours over the problem of the working of the 
pulley, when not a block from the school-house were 
workmen with pulleys in actual operation, hoisting 
bricks for the walls of a new building. 

I believe that the time is not far distant when 
every school in the rural districts and in the small 
towns will be surroimded by a garden, and that 
one of the objects of the course of study will be to 
teach the child something about real country life, 
and about country occupations. 



i6o WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

I am glad to say that at the Tuskegee Institute 
we erected a school-house in and about which the 
little children of the town and vicinity are given a 
knowledge, not only of books, but of the real things 
which they will be called upon to use in their homes. 
Since Tuskegee is surrounded by people who earn 
their living by agriculture, we have near this school- 
house three acres of ground on which the children 
are taught to cultivate flowers, shrubbery, vegetables, 
grains, cotton, and other crops. They are also 
taught cooking, laundering, sewing, sweeping, and 
dusting, how to set a table, and how to make a 
bed — the employments of their daily lives. I have 
referred to this building as a "school-house," but 
we do not call it that, because the name is too 
formal. We have named it " The Children's House." 
And this principle holds true, for children of a 
larger growth, and is especially true of the training 
of the Negro minister who serves the people of the 
smaller towns and country districts. 

In this, as in too many other educational fields, 
the Negro minister is trained to meet conditions 
which exist in New York or in Chicago — in a word, 
it is too often taken for granted that there is no 
difference between the work to be done by Negro 
ministers among our people after only thirty-five 
years of freedom, and that to be done among the 
white people who have had the advantages' of 
centuries of freedom and development. 



1 




> 




r 





.^ 



TEACH THE CHILD SOMETHING ABOUT REAL COUNTRY LIFE 



PLEASURE AND PROFIT OF WORK i6i 

The Negro ministers, except those sent to the 
large cities, go among an agricultural people, a 
people who lead an outdoor life. They are poor, 
without homes or ownership in farms, without 
proper knowledge of agriculture. They are able to 
pay their minister so small and uncertain a salary 
that he can not live on it honestly and pay his 
bills promptly. 

During the three or four years that the minister 
has spent in the theological class room, scarcely a 
single subject that concerns the every-day life of 
his future people has been discussed. He is taught 
more about the soil of the valley of the Nile, or of 
the valley of the river Jordan, than about the soil 
of the State in which the people of his church are 
to live and to work. 

What I urge is that the Negro minister should be 
taught something about the outdoor life of the 
people whom he is to lead. ]\Iore than that, it 
would help the problem immensely if in some more 
practical and direct manner this minister could be 
taught to get the larger portion of his own living 
from the soil — to love outdoor work, and to make 
his garden, his farm, and his farm-house object- 
lessons for his people. 

The Negro minister who earns a large part of his 
living on the farm is independent, and can reprove 
and rebuke the people when they do wrong. This 
is not true of him who is wholly dependent upon 



i62 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

his congregation for his bread. What is equally 
important, an interest in agricultural production 
and a love for work tend to keep a minister from 
that idleness which may prove a source of tempta- 
tion. 

At least once a week, when I am in the South, I 
make it a practice to spend an hour or more among 
the people of Tuskegee and vicinity — among the 
merchants and farmers, white and black. In these 
talks with the real people I can get at the actual 
needs and conditions of those for whom our institu- 
tion is at work. 

When talking to a farmer, I feel that I am 
talking with a real man and not an artificial one — 
one who can keep me in close touch with the real 
things. From a simple, honest cultivator of the 
soil, I am sure of getting first-hand, original in- 
formation. I have secured more useful illustrations 
for addresses in a half -hour's talk with some white 
or coloured farmer than from hours of reading 
books. 

If I were a minister, I think I should make a 
point of spending a day in each week in close, un- 
conventional touch with the masses of the people. 
A vacation employed in ^-isiting farmers, it seems 
to me, w^ould often prepare one as thoroughly for 
his winter's work as a vacation spent in visiting the 
cities of Europe. 



CHAPTER XIII 

On the Experimental Farm 

The purpose most eagerly sought by the Agri- 
cultural Department of the Tuskegee Institute is 
to demonstrate to the farmers of Alabama, first of 
all, that with right methods their acres can be 
made to yield unfailing profit, and that they can 
win in the fight against the deadly mortgage system. 
In many of the Western and Northwestern States 
cheese-making has led the one-crop, wheat-growing 
farmers to independence. The South has felt that 
this industry was beyond its reach, and has set 
small store by the dairy business. At Tuskegee, 
not only has it been demonstrated that cows can 
be made to yield from 50 to 150 per cent, on the 
money invested, but also that every fanner can, 
at moderate cost, make his own cheese, with a good 
supply for the market. Not long ago, the graduate 
of the Institute who is directly in charge of the 
cheese and butter departments, sent to my home 
specimens of six kinds of cheese made at the school 
— Tuskegee Cream, Philadelphia Cream Cheese, 
Neufchatel, Cottage, Club-house, and Cheddar. 
These were as fine grades of cheese as can be found 
in any other creamery. 

163 



1 64 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

To find out what corn, grasses, pease, millet, etc., 
are best suited to the Southern climate and soil is 
the work of several years of earnest labour. At 
present experiments are in progress with ten varieties 
of corn, with vetch, clovers, cassava, sugar beet, 
Cuban sugar cane, eight kinds of millet, the Persian 
and Arabian beans, and many other food and 
forage plants. Fifty-five acres of peach orchard 
are sowed in pease, besides three hundred acres of 
com land utilised for this second or auxiUary crop. 
The vegetable garden covers fifty acres, and there 
is hardly a day when this garden fails to help pay 
the table expenses of the school. 

Stock raising is carried on more extensively each 
year. To get the best hog, sheep, cow, and horse 
for this region of the country is the chief aim. We 
cannot quit cotton, but we must raise our stock and 
our meat. The hen and the bee are great wealth- 
producers, but not more than one in three hundred 
Macon County families raise bees, and few of them 
give any special care to poultry. Therefore the 
school trustees spend a large sum of money each 
year in teaching the practical lessons of these 
industries. 

Statistical data show that the average yield of 
cotton per acre throughout the South is 190 pounds, 
an astonishingly low figure, and, except when high 
prices rule, below the paying point. Every acre 
of cotton in the South can and should be made to 



THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 165 

produce 500 pounds of lint. Should the cotton 
grower add the trifling increase of five pounds of 
lint an acre, it would mean for the Cotton States a 
total increase of 240,000 bales, based on the crop 
reports for 1902, with a value of nearly $15,000,000, 
according to the prices realised on the crop of 1903. 
The experimental station at Tuskegee has appre- 
ciated the tremendous possibilities pictured by such 
statements as these, and the Director, Mr. Carver, 
has demonstrated the value of scientific cultivation, 
by raising nearly 500 pounds of cotton on one acre 
of poor Alabama land. In addition he has taken 
up the problem of crossing varieties of cotton to 
increase the quality of the uplands staple. These 
experiments have been promisingly successful, and 
already a hybrid cotton has been grown which is 
vastly superior to that commonly raised in Alabama. 
In other words, Tuskegee is teaching the farmers 
how to raise a better grade of cotton and more of 
it, w^ithout increasing the acreage planted. 

The subject of soil improvement through natural 
agencies has been one of much concern to both 
ancient and modern agriculturists. The ancient 
Egyptian knew that if he let his land lie idle — 
"rested," as he termed it — he was able to produce 
a much better crop, and that crop would be in 
quantity and quality, all other things being equal, 
proportionate to the length of time this land had 
been rested. 



i66 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

At a later period the fertilising value of the 
legumes (pod-bearing plants) was recognised. But 
as the population of the world increased and civilisa- 
tion advanced, it became more imperative that all 
farming operations should be more intensive and 
less extensive. Each decade saw the progressive 
farmer on his journey of progress correcting many- 
mistakes of the past. He then began to see that it 
was quite possible and practicable to keep his 
ground covered with some crop; and the soil also 
became richer and more fertile every year — by 
reason of this constant tillage — than was possible 
under the old method of letting the land lie fallow 
for a few years. As science shed light upon his art, 
he learned that the crop-yielding capacity of a soil 
was increased by rotating or changing his farm 
crojjs every year upon land not occupied by such 
crops the year previous. 

For seven years Tuskegee has made the subject of 
crop rotation a special study, and submits the plan 
illustrated by the accompanying chart as the most 
simple and satisfactory. This chart and data were 
worked out by the Director of the Agricultural De- 
partment. It was hoped that the experiment would 
shed some light on the following pertinent questions : 

(a) Is it possible to build up the poor upland 
soils of Alabama? 

(b) Can injurious washing away of the soil by 
rains be overcome? 



THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 



167 



(c) Are not the fertilisers necessary for the pro- 
duction of a crop on such land far beyond the reach 
of the average farmer ? 

(d) Granting it can be built up and made pro- 
ductive, will it not take an average life-time ? 




(e) Will it pay to purchase such land ? 

(f) State the smallest amount of such land the 
farmer should buy expecting to make a living off it. 

The plan for rotation as outlined is for a farm of 
forty acres, but is perfectly applicable to one of 



1 68 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

any size, even down to a garden patch. In order 
that our efforts might be guided with the greatest 
degree of intelHgence, the soil was analysed and 
found to be seriously deficient in three very im- 
portant elements of plant food, and in the order 
named : Nitrogen, phosphoric acid and potash. In 
addition to this, it was practically devoid of humus 
(vegetable matter), and otherwise was in as bad a 
physical condition as chemical. Our first efforts 
were directed toward correcting the physical con- 
dition by deep plowing, rebuilding terraces and 
filling in washes. This being done, we are now 
ready to make definite plans for planting our forty- 
acre farm. In a farm this size we find it is wise 
to set aside four acres to be used as indicated: 

(i) One acre for the house, lawn, flower garden, 
nut and ornamental trees. (2) One acre for the 
garden, orchard and small fruits. Upon this all 
the vegetables of various kinds, peaches, pears, 
plums, figs, strawberries, blackberries, grapes, etc., 
should be raised, not simply to supply the needs of 
the family, but there should be a surplus to market. 
(3) One acre for the barn, poultry house, pigsties, 
and other necessary out-buildings. (4) One acre 
for a good pasture where cows, horses, hogs, and 
stock of various kinds might be turned in from 
time to time. The remaining thirty-six acres 
should be planted as follows: 

First year, sixteen acres of cowpcase, eight acres 



THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 169 

of cotton, two acres of ribbon cane, three acres of 
com, one acre of sorghum, one acre of peanuts, three 
acres of sweet potatoes, one acre of teosinte (a 
green fodder plant) , one acre of pumpkins, cushaws, 
squash, etc. 

The second year it will be observed that the peas 
change places with the cotton, corn, ribbon cane, 
sorghum, teosinte, pumpkins and sweet potatoes, 
except in a few instances — and these are where the 
soil was: (a) Naturally poor, as indicated by the 
acre where peanuts and cowpease follow each other 
the first and second years in order to better fit the 
land physically and chemically to produce an 
exhaustive crop like cotton; (b) Sweet potatoes 
following cotton and ribbon cane. Here bottom 
land is represented, and is, therefore, quite fertile. 
The fertilisers necessary to produce a good crop of 
sugar cane and cotton were quite sufficient to pro- 
duce a good crop of potatoes with but little addi- 
tional fertiliser, (c) In this we have a different 
condition — that of neglected bottom soil, deficient 
mainly in nitrogen. Here the pea is planted the 
first year to restore the nitrogen ; and this is followed 
by teosinte and sorghum in one instance and pump- 
kins and ribbon cane in another; the physical 
condition of the soil being best suited to these 
particular crops. With the few exceptions men- 
tioned, the third year is identical with the first. 

Such a system of rotation has enabled us in seven 



I70 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

years to make a net profit of $96.22 from one acre of 
this land, when in the beginning we lost $2.40 per acre. 

In 1897, cowpease were planted, using $5 worth of 
kainite and acid phosphate per acre — mixing them 
together and putting in the drill. The seed, prepa- 
ration of the land, planting, harvesting the light 
crop of vines, etc., amounted to $6.50, making a 
total of $11.50. The crop sold for $9.10, leaving us 
$2.40 behind. 

In 1898, this same acre was planted in sweet 
potatoes and fertilised with $5 worth of kainite and 
acid phosphate, the same as recommended for the 
pease. The after-operation cost $6. Fifty-five 
bushels of marketable potatoes were harvested and 
sold for 60c per bushel, equalling %t,t,, and leaving a 
net balance of $22 on the acre. 

In 1899, cowpease were again planted and fertilised 
exactly the same as in 1897. The returns were 
fifteen bushels of pease, at 55 cents per bushel, equal- 
ling $8.25 ; also one and one-half tons of cured hay, 
worth $22.50, giving a total of $30.75. Less the 
cost — $11.50 — equals $19.25 gain. 

In 1900, it was planted in sorghum cane, fertilised 
with $5 worth of kainite and acid phosphate, plus 
fifteen one-horse wagon-loads of swamp muck and 
decayed forest leaves, at a cost of $3.75; plus the 
cost of harvesting, etc., $4.25, making a total of $13. 
Seven tons of hay were harvested and sold green for 
$5 a ton, leaving a gain of $22. 



THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 171 

In 1 90 1, cowpease were planted and fertilised 
exactly the same as for the sorghum. Twenty-five 
bushels of pease were harvested, worth $13.75 ; two 
tons of cured hay worth $28, making a total of 
$41.75 ; less the cost, equals $28.75 gain. 

In 1902, it was planted in garden truck — cabbage, 
onions, beets, squash, tomatoes, melons, beans, 
turnips, mustard, kale, kohl rabi, rutabagas, etc. 
Fertilised the same as for sorghum and pease, except 
half of the swamp muck w^as replaced by stable 
manure. The total operations cost $21 ; the entire 
crop sold for $60, leaving a gain of $39. 

In 1903, it was again planted in cowpease. Fer- 
tilised the same as for the garden. Twenty-seven 
bushels of pease were harvested, worth $14.85, and 
three tons of cured hay worth $43, equalling $56.85. 
Less the cost, gives us a gain of $43.85 per acre. 

In this same year, a portion of this field, subject to 
the same rotation, was planted in white potatoes, 
using the same amount of muck, kainite and phos- 
phate, at a total cost of $9. Eighty bushels of 
potatoes were harvested and sold for $1 per bushel, 
equalling $80. Before the potatoes were dug, cow- 
pease were planted between the rows and yielded 
$25.22 worth of peas and hay, giving a clear profit of 
$96.22 per acre. 

Another acre subjected to the same treatment was 
planted in early com and followed by sweet potatoes, 
at a cost of $16. It gave a crop as follows: $44.60 



172 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

in corn and fodder, one hundred and five bushels 
of marketable potatoes, and $4.05 worth of hay; 
making in all $111.65. Less $16.90, gives a profit 

of $94.75- 

It is important to note that the data for 1903 
represent only one-half of the crop, as the land is 
now in grain and will be harvested in time for the 
next crop, or grazed, which, of course, will give a 
net balance according to the yield of this grain or its 
value in grazing. We think, therefore, that the 
foregoing facts answer quite conclusively all the 
questions in the affirmative, and that it is wise for 
the Southern farmer to purchase a home even of 
two acres. 



CHAPTER XIV 
The Eagerness for Learning 

Necessity compels most of the coloured youth 
seeking education to work with their hands and pay 
as they go. It is better thus, even for those who do 
not expect to follow trades. I do not believe that 
any young man who has worked his way through 
Yale or Harvard regrets the experience. All whom 
I have met were proud of the achievement, and con- 
sidered it an important part of the training that was 
to make them useful and capable men. 

Many thousand letters of application for admission 
to the Tuskegee Institute are on file in my office. 
Their general trend is one of the strongest arguments 
for the gospel of hard work with head and hands. 
These young men and women from nearly every 
state of the Union and many foreign countries are 
writing me scores of letters daily, asking for a chance 
to get an education. With them there is no such 
thing as taking it for granted that they will be sent 
to school by somebody else. They have felt the 
force of new^ly awakened ambition, and lacking 
money to support themselves for three, four or five 
years in school, are eager to work for it. If their 

173 



174 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

parents share this ambition, it is often the case that 
prayers, and heartfelt wishes, and hopes are all they 
can give their children to help them along the rough 
road to freedom. 

For lack of room, we are forced to refuse each 
year thousands of applicants, earnest, pleading can- 
didates, most of them, who are willing to make any 
sacrifices, to endure any burden of toil, to get the 
training that is to help them and enable them to 
help others. Merely to look through these piles of 
letters as they have accumulated for years would 
require many days' labour. I have chosen a few of 
them at random, for they show why Tuskegee stu- 
dents are in earnest from the beginning of their 
school work to the end, and why they go out to 
earn a living, armed with sincerity of purpose. 

I have taken the liberty of making them easier to 
read by correcting the crude spelling and expression 
in some of them. 

Here is one in which the writer has a fondness for 
imposing words without quite knowing how to 
handle them: 

Dear President: I that delights in education have by recom- 
mendation conceived an idea of appljdng to your worthy school, 
if possible, for education, provided I am qualified to enter. 
Believing that your catalogue will give me a thorough luider- 
standing of the same, I will hereby [ask] that you send me one 
of your complete catalogues that I may prepare to enter the 
ensueing fall. Now, sir, you will please excuse me if I give you 
knowledge of my disposition. I am full of delight in education. 
Therefore I will try to be one of the most pious students of the 



THE EAGERNESS FOR LEARNING 175 

time. This would also cause me to be grateful for the privileges, 
especially those of labour, for this is my first inquiry whether I 
might remain in school during vacation and work. In fact, I 
would have, please, sir, a prompt and continual job in school. 
Please, sir, to interest yourself in my welfare in this circumstance. 

Dear Sir: Wishing to enter the Tuskegee Institute, I hereby 
write you for information. I wish to enter night school and 
work in the day as an apprentice in the machine department. 
My parents are poor and not able so assist me in going to school, 
so my only chance is to work my way if there be any chance at 
all. I am now twenty-one years old. I am working with my 
father on a farm where I have been working ever since I have 
been large enough. I have been going so school some, but a very 
little, while I were very small, and I had not been in several years 

until this Mr. came here, and now I am working every day 

and going to school at night. I am proud to say that he has 
done me good two ways by telling mc of the chances afforded 
in the Tuskegee Institute for poor boys and gii-ls to educate 
themselves, and he has enthused my ambition for educating and 
bettering my condition. Please send me a catalogue of the 
school, that I may sec just how I must start to enter. 
Yours truly, desiring an education. 

Dear Sir: I have heard so much and read so much of your 
school, until I am craving to come and take a part with the lead- 
ing people of my colour. Mr. Washington, I've heard that a 
poor person who desires to make a mark in the world and haven't 
the means, you would take them and let them work the first year 
for two hours lessons at night, and let this help on their expenses 
for the next year. If this is correct, will you please write me at 
once, for I am a poor girl, and is so very anxious to learn some 
good trade, also have good learning in books, and I am too poor 
to go to school and pay. So if you will let me in, I am willing 
to work very hard, indeed I am. Please send me a clear under- 
standing of the school, for I am anxious to be a great woman. 
Please write me at an early date. 

Dear Sir: I have read and heard a great deal of your school, 
and I want to attend it this summer. I would like to know 



176 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

whether I could work all of my way or not, as my parents is not 
able to send me, and I want to go to school, I want to take a 
special course in sewing. 

Kind Sir: I received your immediate reply, and I was truly 
glad to hear from you, and to receive your circular of information 
and its meanings. But there is a few questions of importance I 
wish to ask. Can I enter the night school at once, or is there 
any limited time the school closes, and when are the sessions ? 
Now, I hope I can enter at once, and stay the j'ear around, or 
as long as I can be employed at the place, so that I can pay my 
board and schooling, as I have no parents and I am trying to 
make a start for an education. I am a member of the church 
and a lover of the Sunday School, also I feel that I have a superior 
calling from on high. Therefore I wish to secure even a good 
English education. May God provide for your success is the 
prayer of your humble servant. 

Kind Sir: I have thought to write you since your lecture up 
here in the adjoining county last fall. Mr. Washington, I have 
a great desire for an education and it seems that I have many 
besetments in life that prohibits me from saving just the amount 
of money that I need to educate myself as I desire so do, and I 
will inquire of you if your college has any way that a young man 
could work his ttiition out. If so, please let me know just what 
terms I could enter on, as I have fully made up my mind to try 
to educate myself, provided any school will help me in my strug- 
gle. I see the need of an education, and I see that there is fields 
of work for a j^oung man of my age. Mr. Washington, if you 
please, give me a chance if you can, I am willing to work my way 
through at any position you would put me at to pay for my learn- 
ing. I am not too proud to do any work I can help to educate 
myself. I want to join that goodly number of Negroes that is 
making such success at your school. Please pardon such a long 
letter. Your humble questioner. 

Mr. Washington: I would be more than glad to appreciate 
your school, inasmuch as to come down and attend about two 
terms, if you are not filled. I am not able to pay my board in 
money, and if there is any vacancy in your school where I can 




o 

X 



THE EAGERNESS FOR LEARNING 1.77 

work and pay, I would be more than glad. Please let me know 
immediately, so I will know what to do. Let me know all about 
your charges per month. Please reply at onee, because I want 
to come as early as possible. 

Dear Sir: I received your kind circulars some days ago, and I 
was more than glad to hear as I did. I would have wrote before 
now, but thinkiiig I could come soon, I waited. Though times 
is so hard, of course a poor boy that has no one to help him has a 
hard time, but by the help of the Lord, I am going to make a 
man of myself. I want to come as soon as I can. I am going 
to bring every one that will come with me. I want to stay there 
and work until I can master a trade. 

Dear Sir: I takes great pleasure in writing to j^ou a few lines, 
and hopes this will find you well. I want to complete the fuU 
course of education, and am not exactly able to bear my expenses 
through. I would like to know whether you will give me a 
position to work to pay my expenses through. If you will, it 
will be a great favour and consolation to me. Write soon, and 
let me hear from you, and please send me full particulars. 

Dear Sir: After reading and hearing so much talk of your 
school, I made it up in my mind that I would like to attend your 
school, as I have been trying to get an education for the last two 
years. I attended school here in Texas for six months this term, 
but owing to my money running short I had to quit school and 
go to work. I am a poor boy, and I desire to get an education. 
Do you think that yovi could give me work ta pay my school ? 
I want an industrial education, and am not able to pay for it, 
and I will do any work I can get to pay for my lesson. 

"I would like to attend your school, but being poor I can't 
enter as a day student. I write to know if I can enter as a work 
student. I would like to enter soon enough so that I can work 
during the summer months. Mr. Washington, I am anxious to 
get a good training. Being poor and fatherless, I have had few 
advantages, and that is why I have applied to you as I have. 
If you will or will not receive me, please let me know as soon as 
possible." 



178 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

"I received your circular and was carefully reading the terms. 
There is some few more hints I would like to ask you. If I 
arrive there with forty dollars, could I attend the whole nine 
months of a school year ? My occupation has been for the last 
four years cooking. Before then it was farming, but I can do 
a little laundry work also. In these four years I have attended 
school two terms in pubUc school. I am very anxious for an 
industrial education, so therefore I desire to attend your school. 
The industrial studies I would like to learn are carriage-trimming 
and laundry work. I\Iy studies are United States History, Arith- 
metic, English, and Geography. If j^ou think I can stay the 
whole term on forty dollars let me know, and I will be there in 
August. I am twenty-two years of age." 

"Please let me know whether you can furnish girls work 
enough to support them in school. I see in the ' Voice of ^Missions ' 
where you will give ministers work to support themselves. Is 
there any chance for a girl who wants an education? I have 
read of your school, and would like so well to come there, but I 
live so far away, until I would not be able to pay my fare from 
New Orleans and then pay my school expenses. Please let me 
know the cheapest that I could enter school, also the distance 
and cost from New Orleans. I would like to enter next season 
without fail. Please write me by return mail without fail." 

Dear Sir: During your recent lecturing tour you stopped here 
and I was determined to hear you, and when I heard you I was 
fired with the ambition to go to school. I tried to get an audience 
with you, but owing to so many others who were as enthusiastic 
as I, I could only speak a few words with j'ou. Do you remem- 
ber the young man who spoke to you about going to your school ? 
As I said before, I did not have time to explain it all to you. I 
am unable to pay my way through your school, but I am more 
than willing to work my way through. You told me that I could 
when I spoke to you about it. 

Dear Sir: My boy ran away from home during my absence 
from home in January. After he was gone, I learned from his 
associates that he said he was going to Tuskegee to school. 
Please inform me whether he has made his appearance there or 
not. 



THE EAGERNESS FOR LEARNING 179 

Dear Sir : Do you think it best for me to enter as soon as 
possible, or wait until the next term, but I would rather enter 
as soon as possible. But will do as you think best. I have a 
mother and grandmother to support, and if I can get an educa- 
tion I know that I will be better fitted to support them, and I 
am sure that you will agree with me in the matter. And if you 
will give me a chance, I will be a man among my people some 
day. 

Dear Sir: I am sorry that I cannot be admitted. In case of 
a vacancy, will j^ou notify me, or until there is a chance could I 
come to the school in the summer ? I am a poor girl. If I can't 
come in the summer, I am going to try to earn enough money 
to come and stay two or three months as soon as you will let me, 
even if there is no room to live at the school. 

' ' I will write you a few lines to ask if you please to let me enter 
into j'our band of coloured scholars. That is, I want to come 
to 3'our school in the daytime, or at night and work the rest of 
the time. If there is any way fixed, let me know whether my 
name can be put in your roll book. I have just left school a few 
da3-s ago, and I want to get in as soon as possible. I have been 
striving to come to 5'ovir school going on three years, and at last 
I have got to the point that if you will let me in I will be over 
there the first day of March. Please, sir, let me in, if there is 
any way that can be fixed to do so. I would be one of the hap- 
piest boys in the world if you say I could come. Please write 
me word just as soon as you read it." 

Dear Sir: Having just read again a short biography of your 
life, and being desirous of obtaining a better education, I thought 
I would write you and perhaps gain the necessary information. 
Last year I completed the course in the High School here. 
When school opened in September, I joined the Normal Training 
Class here and since then I have been training in for a second and 
third grade teacher. I have had about eight months of piano 
music and two of vocal, and one school year in the elements of 
elocution. I am desirous of becoming a school teacher, and 
realise how necessary it is to have a better education. I have 
no support but an aged mother. I had almost given up hope, 



i8o WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

but when I read of others working their way through college, I 
am resolved to try. Is there any possible way of earning my 
schooling at Tuskegee ? I thought perhaps I could teach in the 
primary grades a part of the day to pay for what I should get. 
Or perhaps I could work in some other way. I am willing to do 
any honest labour to get an education. You doubtless get let- 
ters of this kind daily, but I only ask that you please answer and 
tell me if there is any chance for a poor girl obtaining knowledge. 
I am so anxious that I would wiUingly work during the vacations 
and hoHdays. Please answer this, and if I cannot gain entrance 
at Tuskegee, perhaps you can tell me of some school where 
I can. If your answer is favorable, I will immediately begin to 
earn money to pay my way there, for those of us who are in the 
training class receive no salary. 



CHAPTER XV 

The Value of Small Things 

A LIFETIME of hard work has shown me the value 
of Httle things of every day. We preach them at 
Tuskegee, and try to enforce them in the daily 
round of sixteen hundred students' lives. We speak 
of them because they are at the bottom of character- 
building, and because no person can go on year by 
year forgetting them, without having his soul 
warped and made small and weak. We want 
young men and women to go out, not as slaves of 
their daily routine, but masters of their circum- 
stances. But the structure must be built a brick 
at a time, and no act is without its influence. I am 
in the habit of talking to the student body when it 
is assembled in the chapel for the first time after 
the opening of the school year with a good deal of 
practical exhortation about the "value of little 
things," unimportant as some of them may seem to 
the new-comers at Tuskegee. They are told, for 
example, that among the resolutions which each 
should abide by through the term, is to keep in 
close and constant touch with their homes. "You 
can do this," I have said, "in no better way than 

i8i 



i82 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

by forming the habit of writing a letter home once 
every week. I fear that this is not always done. 
I want to see each one of you grow into the habit of 
writing a letter to your parents or your friends at 
home, as often as you can find the time. I do not 
mean by this that you shall get a little piece of 
waste paper, snatch up a lead pencil, and scribble a 
hasty note, asking them to send you some money, 
or to send you a dress, or a hat. I mean for you to 
select a time — the Sabbath, if you can find no other 
time — and sit down in your rooms, or go to the 
library, take plenty of time, get good paper, the 
best ink, and write your mother and father, your 
brothers and sisters, a good, encouraging, well- 
thought-out letter. It will pay you to do that, 
even if you look at it from a selfish standpoint. 
Grow into the habit of doing that every week while 
you are students here. 

" It will keep you in touch with your homes, and 
it always pays to keep under the home influence, no 
matter how humble that home may be, no matter 
how much poverty there may be about it, no matter 
how much ignorance there may be in it — it always 
pays to keep in close touch with your homes. I 
want you to do this, not only for your own sake, 
but more for the sake of your parents, for the sake 
of those who are trying to keep you at this institu- 
tion. You can make them feel your appreciation 
in no better way than by writing them regularly in 



THE VALUE OF SMALL THINGS 183 

the manner that I have tried to urge you to do. It 
will encourage them. It will make them feel that 
it pays to make the sacrifice for you." 

These practical talks on the value of small things 
are enforced by a corp of inspectors, whose practised 
eyes are quick to detect the soiled collar, the loose 
button, the unpolished boot, when the forces as- 
semble for meals and for chapel, and the personal 
appearance of every student is carefully scrutinised. 
Nothing is more humiliating to a Tuskegee boy or 
girl than to be taken out of line as the body marches 
out of chapel. 

It requires care and thought to make a hasty 
toilet after a ten-hour day on the farm or in the 
shops, and be ready for supper on the stroke of the 
bell. And a student late to meals goes without that 
meal unless he has a good excuse. But out of such 
a system arises a pride in personal appearance, and 
a spirit of self-respect that goes far toward making 
useful men and women. It must be remembered, 
too, that much of the raw material which is taken 
in hand at Tuskegee has not had the advantages of 
any system and order at home, even in the primary 
qualities of personal cleanliness and neatness. 

It sounds like the discipline of a man-of-war to 
say that one loose or missing button on the clothing 
of any one of a thousand boys is almost instantly 
noted and recorded, but the students themselves are 
proud of the fact that it is seldom that one of them 



1 84 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

must be called out of line by an inspector. They 
have responded to the test set for them, and they 
never forget it. They feel a personal sorrow that 
the epithet " shiftless" has been used to characterise 
their race, and they realise that it must be lived 
down in small things as well as great. 

There is a student police force at Tuskegee, the 
members of which are uniformed and allowed to 
carry policemen's short "clubs" on their night 
rounds. A visitor, who was on his way to my house, 
to dine, met at the gate a young man in uniform, 
apparently on guard, who saluted with his raised 
stick. My guest expressed some surprise, saying: 

" I did not know that you had to guard against the 
hostility of the Southern white people of this region. 
It is shocking to know that race antagonism can be 
so violent and unreasonable." 

I replied: "I have no better friends than the 
white people of Tuskegee, and there is no need for 
a bodyguard, I assure you. That alarming young 
man was simply a student policeman who saluted 
you as he is required to do all teachers and visitors. 
He is allowed to carry a stick, not because he will 
ever need to use it, but because it is a badge of his 
authority, an emblem of the responsibility of his 
position. The officers of our cadet corps carry 
swords for the same reasons." 

The boy policeman and his club typify the worth 
of little things, indirectly furnishing a help toward 



THE VALUE OF SMALL THINGS 185 

the complex structure of character. The young 
man in uniform, trudging on his night rounds about 
the school grounds, feels himself more of a man if 
he is equipped for a man's work. It adds to his 
self-respect, and it helps him to feel that his duty 
is an important one. 

The Savings Bank Department of the school, 
which is part of the regularly authorised banking 
department of the institution, has been, in addition 
to its education in business methods, a great aid in 
teaching the students the value of little things. 
Early in the present year, there were to the credit of 
the students in the savings fund deposits of more 
than $14,000. This was largely made up of small 
accounts. The depositors are allowed to have check- 
books, and to draw on their accounts checks in as 
small amounts as twenty-five cents. As a result they 
do not carry their available cash around in their 
pockets, but hasten to the bank with it, and settle 
nearly all transactions among themselves by check. 

This impresses on their minds the value of saving, 
for the bank account is in itself a strong incentive. 
These deposits come from various sources. The 
work done by the students in the various industrial 
departments is not paid for in cash, but its value 
is credited to their accounts with the school for the 
board, lodging, laundry, etc., furnished them. 
Their work amounted last year to a cash value of 
more than $90,000. 



i86 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

For "ready money," however, they must depend 
on what they receive from home, which is a small 
proportion of the total bank deposits, and ujDon 
what they are able to earn out of working hours. 
Many of them act as agents on commission for mail- 
order houses, which supply clothing, shoes, under- 
wear, and a variety of necessaries and a few luxuries. 
In the summer a large number of young men go 
from Tuskegee to work in the Southern States, 
many of them in the Alabama coal fields, to earn 
money to pay the expenses of their education 
through the next school year. They save these 
earnings and bring them back to deposit in the 
institute bank. 

But these savings are not in dollars for the most 
part, but in quarters, dimes, and even pennies. 
In looking over the books of the bank recently, the 
individual ledger accounts attracted my notice. 
There was a whole page given the account of one 
girl, whose individual deposits did not average more 
than ten cents. There were several of three cents, 
and one of two cents. It seemed to me that this 
girl student w^as worth watching in after life. If 
she was willing to walk across the grounds and back, 
a round trip of perhaps half a mile, from her dormi- 
tory or w^ork-shop, to make a deposit of three cents 
in the savings bank, and to continue her deposits, 
although she was never able to save more than a 
few cents at a time, she was fast learning the value 



THE VALUE OF S^IALL THINGS 187 

of small things, and was already far along the path 
of practical usefulness. 

One thousand students assemble three times a 
day in the main dining-hall. They take their seats 
without confusion or noise. A line of young men 
and women face each other at each table, and over 
them presides a student host and a hostess. The 
young women are seated first, and then the young 
men march in. But no conversation is allowed until 
all are seated, and until after a simple grace is 
chanted by this chorus of a thousand voices. 

The meal is something more than a necessary 
consumption of food. The deference which a 
young man should always pay to woman is taught, 
without demonstration, by the manner of assembling. 
Self-restraint is taught the girls by w^aiting five 
minutes in their seats before they begin to eat and 
to talk. Their meeting at table inculcates good 
manners. The boys are on their mettle to act like 
gentlemen, and the host and hostess feel a personal 
responsibility for enforcing the little details of cour- 
tesy and good breeding. 

The corps of teachers assembles for meals in 
another dining-room. They are not needed to 
preserve order or enforce discipline, as the students 
have that matter largely in their own hands. In- 
spectors see that their clothes have been brushed, 
their faces and hands cleaned of the stains of the 
farm and work shops, as the army enters the dining- 



i88 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

hall. But behaviour takes care of itself. It is not 
long since I read of riotous scenes in the " commons " 
of certain Northern imiversities, in which students 
were guilty of throwing bread and crockery around 
the room. This has never happened at Tuskegee, 
and this kind of disorder in our dining-hall is quite 
beyond my imagination. 

Once in a while, when tired of ofhce work, I walk 
across the school grounds and drop into one of the 
dormitories to talk with the boys or girls in their 
rooms, and see for myself how they are living and 
what they are doing to make their rooms, not only 
spotlessly neat, but livable and attractive. Not 
long ago I went into a room in one of the girls' halls, 
which was clean but utterly cheerless. She said in 
explanation that she had been told that, if she 
could not keep the photographs and all the other 
bric-a-brac that finds its way into a girl's room 
dustless and in order, she should store the superfluous 
articles away. I told her that the result of this 
misguided endeavour was a room that looked as much 
hke a bam as it did a home. She told me how much 
she had spent during the term in buying chocolate 
to make "fudge." For the same outlay she could 
have had pretty framed prints on her walls, and 
other simple adornment in good taste and without 
"clutter." That evening I said, while talking to 
the students in chapel : 

"I was in the rooms of several girls to-day. I 



THE VALUE OF SMALL THINGS 189 

had been in these rooms before. Some of the 
rooms are always clean and attractive. You will 
find a number of little, delicate, home-like touches 
about them. You have only to go into another room, 
and you will feel as if you wanted to go out as 
soon as possible. This latter room has possibly 
two or three girls in it, and they are always full of 
excuses, always explaining. They can stand for 
five, ten, fifteen minutes, and reel off excuses by the 
yard. Those girls, unless they change, will never 
get ahead very far, I fear. 

■ ■ The habit of making excuses, of giving explana- 
tions, instead of achieving results, grows from year 
to year upon one, until finally it gets such a hold 
that I think the victim finds himself almost as well 
satisfied with a good, long-drawn-out excuse, as he 
does with real tangible achievement. The school- 
boy and girl must be taught such lessons in every 
moment of routine duty, and there are no "little 
things," to be carelessly overlooked, without danger 
that repetition will breed bad habit. The student 
may think these things are little, but permanent 
injury to character is the price paid for indifference 
and carelessness. The price is paid in permanent 
injury to character. 

' ' Every dollar received at Tuskegee comes through 
hard work on the part of some one. Every dollar 
is placed with us because the donor feels that perhaps 
it will accomplish more good here than elsewhere. 



I90 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

It is always a question for them to choose between 
giving a dollar here or to some other institution. 
The attitude of every student, if he wishes to be 
honest, must be that he has no right to ask persons 
to support the school if a dollar goes into the hands 
of an individual who is not doing his very best to 
earn the worth of it, every moment of every day, 
from rising bell to " taps" on the bugle at the boy's 
hall." 

Looking at education from this view-point, every 
detail of the work and administration of a com- 
munity of sixteen hundred people, with their great 
variety of activities, becomes vitally important, a 
part toward the complete whole. 

This doctrine of "small things" finds expression 
in an infinite number of channels. One of the 
despised but abundant products of the Southern 
farms has been the cowpea. It is used extensively 
as a fodder plant, and as a fertiliser by plowing it 
under. The cowpea is also one of the most nu- 
tritious of foods, when properly cooked, but while 
it has been growing at their doors the coloured 
people have neglected it as a part of their diet. 
The Tuskegee agricultural expert investigated the 
cowpea. He found that it was as valuable for food 
as the far-famed "Boston bean," and prepared his 
table of analyses to prove it. Then he worked out 
no less than eighteen different appetising recipes for 
cooking the humble cowpea, and made practical 



THE VALUE OF SMALL THINGS 191 

demonstration, in a booth of his own making, during 
one of the Negro Conference gatherings. 

These recipes he had printed for distribution in a 
neat and attractive pamphlet, and in this way he 
opened in defense of the cowpea a successful 
crusade, which has had direct results. It was a 
small thing, but it was not too small to be overlooked 
in the effort to make the best of the resources close 
at hand. 



CHAPTER XVI 
Religious Influences at Tuskegee 

In the rapid growth of the institution along 
academic and industrial lines, the spiritual side of 
the school has not been neglected. During the last 
fifteen years a regularly appointed chaplain, an 
ordained evangelical minister, has been connected 
with the school, which is non-denominational, but 
by no means non-religious. It has much of the 
machinery of most regularly organised churches, 
although, for good reasons, it has not seemed best, 
yet, to organise a church in connection with the 
institution. It has, in fact, a much better equipment 
than most churches about it, both as to its house of 
worship and auxiliary services. 

First : There is, each Sunday, a regular preaching 
service, at which teachers and students are expected 
to be present. 

Second: Every Sunday morning, during the 
months of school, a large and enthusiastic Christian 
Endeavour Society meets for an hour's appropriate 
exercises. Teachers and students alike belong to 
it, serve on its committees, and, in many ways, are 
very helpful to the religious side of the school. The 

192 



RELIGIOUS INFLUENCES 193 

selections of scripture read or repeated and com- 
mented upon, the prayers offered, and the songs 
contributed by the students, show that they are 
preparing themselves for leadership in religion as 
well as for usefulness in shop and class room when 
they leave Tuskegee. 

Third : The students are divided into thirty-six 
Sunday-school classes, each Sunday, to study the 
international lesson. There is also a Junior Sunday- 
school, composed of the children of teachers and of 
families near the school. 

Fourth : A flourishing organisation of the Y. M. 

C. A., ably officered by students, makes itself felt 
for good both among the young men students as well 
as by visits, through committees, to the surrounding 
country, each Sunday, to look after sick and needy 
persons, especially the aged poor. 

Fifth: The young women students, under the 
leadership of lady teachers, sustain three societies 
among themselves, viz. : The One Cent Missionary 
Society, the oldest in the institution. It is auxiliary 
to the Woman's Home Missionary Association of 
Boston, to which it sends $5 annually. The Edna 

D. Chancy Missionary Club has its own special 
work, as has also the Y. W. C. T. U. Recently, 
there has been organised a Y. W. C. A. to reach a 
younger class of girls. Each of these organisations 
has proved itself a potent factor for good, not only 
in the school and its immediate environs, but 



194 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

beyond ; for it is the policy of the Tuskegee Institute 
to spread its various influences to other towns and 
communities, wherever its graduates and students 
find work, in whatever capacity. 

Sixth: The Humane Society has done much to 
teach the students the proper care of dumb animals. 

Seventh : The Tuskegee Women's Club, a branch 
of the National Association of Coloured Women, 
which meets twice a month to discuss such topics as 
look to the betterment of the w^omen and girls of the 
Negro race in the United States. Another society, 
more local, is called Mothers' Council. Here the 
married women meet to discuss household matters. 
One of the members of this body, the wife of an 
instructor, though herself not a teacher, has for 
several years been conducting a Sunday afternoon 
meeting for neglected children in one of the tene- 
ment sections of the town of Tuskegee. The room 
in which the meetings are held is rented for this 
purpose by the students of the Bible School and 
paid for out of their weekly contributions. 

Eighth: Once, daily, at evening (Friday and 
Saturday excepted), the whole school assembles in 
the spacious chapel for devotional services, led by 
the Principal or his representative, before retiring. 

Ninth : Perhaps the most helpful religious meeting 
of all is the Friday evening prayer-meeting, where 
teachers and students gather, before retiring, as 
one large family, for informal worship; for it is the 



RELIGIOUS INFLUENCES 195 

most home-like of all the services. Any one is at 
liberty to take part, without restraint, and at times 
so much interest is manifested that it often happens 
that two or more will be on their feet at the same 
time striving to get a llearitig, or will raise hymns 
or begin to pray, or speak or repeat verses of Scripture 
at the same time. But the utmost courtesy and 
good nature prevail. These meetings are pro- 
ductive of much good. Many of the students date 
their conversion from the impulse received at these 
Friday evening meetings. 

Tenth: The Week of Prayer is usually observed 
for two weeks, in January, every year, with more 
or less spiritual profit to the w^hole institution. 
The outward results from the meetings held during 
the present year are the hopeful and happy conver- 
sions of more than one hundred and fifty students, 
from all classes, post-graduates, special students, 
down through the preparatory grades. The most 
of these have received, and, after careful and 
prayerful consideration, have signed, in duplicate, 
the following pledge, keeping one copy and returning 
the other to the Chaplain : 

MY PLEDGE. 

I thank God that I was led by the Spirit to accept Christ. I 
am glad I am a Christian, and I promise: 

1. That, as soon as I can, I will join the church of my choice, 
and by word and deed help to build up the kingdom of Christ 
on earth. 

2. That I will, daily, think of, or read some portion of the 



196 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

Bible, and will pray, in private each day of mj- life, closing each 
prayer with this verse: 

"Lord Jesus, I long to be perfectly whole; 
I want Thee forever to live in my soul ; 
Break down every idol, cast out everj- foe: 
Now wash me and I shall be whiter than snow." 

— Amen. 



Name 



P. O. address. 



The reclamation of many backsliders also, as 
well as the spiritual awakening of the teacher's, 
many of whom joined heartily in the work of soul- 
saving, were gratifying and encouraging results. 

Eleventh: Last, but not least, is the wholesome 
influence the Bible Training School has on the 
entire Institute. 

This school is a department of the Normal and 
Industrial Institute. It was founded some years 
ago by a lady living in New York, in order that 
poor young men and women might be enabled, on 
the Tuskegee plan, to fit themselves for the Christian 
ministry and other active religious work. 

A night class is connected with the Bible School, 
to reach those who cannot attend during the day, 
but who are desirous of knowing more about the 
Bible. The members of this class are the farmers 
and other labouring men who live in the neigh- 
bourhood. They come twice a week for an hour 



RELIGIOUS INFLUENCES 197 

and a half, some of them walking two, three, four, 
and five miles each way, and show the greatest 
interest in the lessons. Most of them are pastors 
and members of churches in their communities. 
The students of the Bible School are expected to 
spend their Sundays in religious work among the 
churches and mission stations in the surrounding 
country. Every Sunday morning they may be 
seen, in groups of two or more, starting out, after 
breakfast, to their various appointments, reaching 
from four to six miles into the country, and to the 
jail and the churches in the town of Tuskegee. If 
they do not find a place of labour, they are encour- 
aged to begin in new fields, and to reach people 
who might otherwise be neglected. Several have 
started missions, and two, during the history of the 
Bible School, have organised and built churches, 
and turned them over to their respective denomina- 
tional connections. The Bible students are required 
to make a weekly report of their outside work on 
the following blank: 

WEEKLY REPORT 

OF THE 

Religious Work Done in Tuskegee and Vicinity, 

by students of 

PHELPS HALL BIBLE TRAINLVG SCHOOL 

Work done for the week ending Sunday night 19 

1. Name of student Arc you a minister 

Licentiate or a Layman ? 

2. What is j-Qur denomination ? 



198 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

3. Where do you labour? (State whether in a 

church, jail, or almshouse, etc.) 

4. Sermons, Give: 

ist. Number preached 

2nd. Scriptures read 

3d. The text to each 

4th. The subjects to each 

5. Number of adults present ? 

ist. Males 

2nd. Females 

3rd. Children 

6. Number of Sunday Schools attended? 

Number of children present 

ist. Males 

2nd. Females 

3rd. Adults 

7 . Number of prayer meetings attended ? 

8. Number of marriages solemnised ? 

9. Number of sick visited in their homes? 

10. Number of fimerals attended ? 

11. Number who have secured homes through your advice and 
help during the past week 

12. Does your S. S. use Sunday literature, such as books, quar- 
terlies, S. S. papers, etc. ? State which 

Sign here. (Name) 

(Home P. O. address) 

1^* Please answer EVERY question, and return to E. J. Penny. 

A volunteer prayer meeting is held daily, just 
after breakfast, in the Bible School building, under 
the guidance of the Bible students. This meeting 
is well attended by young men of all the classes, 
who take turns in leading the services. 

Any one passing this building at that hour will 
hear songs of praise and earnest voices in prayer 
to God. All these societies, at Christmas and 



RELIGIOUS INFLUENCES 199 

Thanksgiving, unite in taking food and other com- 
forts to the deserving poor and helpless. 

All the young men and boys at Tuskegee are 
assigned to groups numbering twelve to fifteen, 
each group in charge of a teacher. There are 
eighty of these small companies formed that the 
boys may become better acquainted with one 
another, and grow in a spirit of mutual helpfulness. 
Every boy feels that he can go to the teacher who 
is in charge of his social unit for advice and com- 
fort. This feature of the school life is under the 
general direction of the Chaplain, and has done 
much to make the students feel at home. Disci- 
pline has been more satisfactory since the plan was 
adopted. The young women students are organ- 
ised in other ways to meet their own social and 
religious needs, and to bring them into personal 
relations with their teachers. 

All these forces are working more and more for 
good, and the School is in an encouraging and 
healthy religious condition. 



CHAPTER XVII 
Some Tangible Results 

Since the founding of the Tuskegee Normal and 
Industrial Institute, in 1881, the total enrollment of 
young men and women who have remained long 
enough to be helped, in any degree, is about six thou- 
sand. From the beginning, the school has sought to 
find out the chief occupations by which our people 
earn their living, and to train men and women to be 
of service in these callings. Those who go out follow 
the industries they have learned, or teach in public 
or private schools, teaching part of the year and 
farming or labouring the remainder of their time. 
Some follow house-keeping or other domestic service, 
while others enter professions, the Government ser- 
vice, or become merchants. Many of the teachers 
give instiiiction in agriculture, or in the industries. 
The professional men are largely physicians and the 
professional women are mostly trained nurses. 

After diligent investigation I have been unable to 
find a dozen former students in idleness. They are 
busy in schoolroom, field, shop, home or church. 
They are busy because they have placed themselves 
in demand by learning to do that which the world 

200 



SOME TANGIBLE RESULTS 201 

wants done, and because they have learned tlic dis- 
grace of idleness, and the sweetness of labour. One 
of the greatest embarrassments which confronts our 
school at the present time is our inability to supply 
any large proportion of the demands for our students 
that are coming to us constantly from the people 
of both races, North and South. But, apart from 
their skill and training, that which has made Tus- 
kegee men and women succeed is their spirit of 
unselfishness and their willingness to sacrifice them- 
selves for others. In many cases while building 
up a struggling school in a community, they have 
worked for months without any fixed salary or 
promise of salary, because they have learned that 
helping some one else is the secret of happiness. 
Because of the demand for men and women trained 
at Tuskegee, it is difficult to keep a large proportion 
of the students in the school until they graduate. 
It is, therefore, not so easy to show the results of the 
work in concrete form as it would be if a larger 
number of the students finished. But the facts 
obtainable prove that the school is achieving its 
purpose in preparing its students to do what the 
world wants done. 

Some years ago a young man named Williams 
came to Tuskegee from ]\Iobilc, Alabama. Before 
coming, he had nearly completed the public-school 
course of study at Mobile, and had been earning 
about fifty cents a da}' at various kinds of unskilled 



202 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

labour. He wished to study further in the 
academic branches, with the object of combining 
this knowledge with the trade of brick-masonry. 
To take the full course in brick-masonry, including 
mechanical drawing, he should have remained three 
years. He remained for six months only. During 
this time, he got some rough knowledge of brick- 
masonry and advanced somewhat in his academic 
studies. When he returned to Mobile, it soon 
became known that he had been working at brick- 
masonry. At once he was dubbed a full-fledged 
mason. As there was unusual building activity in 
Mobile at that time, he found himself in great 
demand, and, instead of having to seek odd jobs, he 
soon saw that, in spite of his rather crude knowl- 
edge of the trade, he could earn one dollar and 
fifty cents per day, and have more work offered 
him than he could do. When the three months' 
vacation expired, Williams debated whether he 
ought to return to Tuskegee to finish his course or 
remain at home and try to purchase a home for his 
widowed mother. Hence, seeing an opportunity to 
make two dollars a day at his trade, he decided not 
to return. As in hundreds of other cases, the Mobile 
man had unusual natural ability, and w^as able to get 
out of his six months at Tuskegee a mental, spirit- 
ual, and bodily awakening which fixed his purpose 
in life. Not only this, but he had made such a start 
in his trade that by close study and observation he 



SOME TANGIBLE RESULTS 203 

was able to improve from month to month in the 
quantity and quality of his work, and within a few 
months he ceased to work for other people by the 
day and began to make small contracts. At the 
present time, Mr. Williams is one of the most sub- 
stantial coloured citizens of Mobile. He owns his 
home and is a reliable and successful contractor, 
doing important work for both races. In addition 
to being a successful brick-mason and contractor, 
he owns and operates a dairy business, and his 
class of patronage is not limited by any means to 
members of the Negro race. 

The value, then, of the work of schools, where 
the trade or economic element enters in so largely 
as it does at Tuskegee, cannot be judged in any 
large degree by the number of students who finish 
the full course and receive diplomas. What is true 
of the course in brick-masonry is true in larger or 
smaller measure of all the other thirty-seven indus- 
trial divisions of the school. 

Another example : Crawford D. Menafee came to 
Tuskegee about 1890, and began taking the agricul- 
tural and academic courses. He was older than the 
average student, and entered one of the lower classes. 
Because he had no money to pay any part of his 
expenses, he was given permission to enter the night 
school, which meant that he was to work on the farm 
ten hours a day, receiving, meanwhile, lessons in the 
principles of farming and devoting two hours at 



204 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

night to the academic branches. He was never 
classed as a very bright student, and in the purely 
literary studies made such slow progress, after 
repeating several classes, that he left two years 
before completing either the agricultural or the 
academic course. It was noted, however, that, 
notwithstanding inability to grasp theoretical work, 
he manifested unusual enthusiasm and showed 
special abiHty in practical farm work. His ability 
was so marked that he was asked to take a place of 
responsibility as assistant to one of the school's 
farm managers. It soon became evident that he 
possessed extraordinary executive ability. He read 
constantly everything of value which he could secure 
upon agriculture, and soon began to show signs of 
considerable intellectual growth and the possession 
of a rarely systematic mind. Mr. Menafee was soon 
promoted to a higher position at Tuskegee. 

A few years later, there came a call for some one to 
introduce theoretical and practical agriculture into 
the State Normal College for coloured people at 
Tallahassee, Florida. ]\Ir. Menafee was recom- 
mended. The students had no wish to learn agri- 
culture. They were opposed to it in any form. By 
tact and patience, Mr. Menafee gradually won the 
students and made them see the importance of 
intelligent cultivation of the soil. Mr. Menafee has 
now been in charge of the agricultural department 
of the Florida school for three years, and has made 



SOME TANGIBLE RESULTS 205 

the study of theoretical and practical farming so 
effective that it is now one of the most popular 
branches in the school. Not only do the young 
men cultivate a large acreage each year, but a num- 
ber of girls also receive instruction in gardening, 
dairying, and poultry raising. In a word, the whole 
attitude of the school toward agriculture has been 
revolutionised, and the department has been placed 
upon an effective and practical foundation. 

There are hundreds of cases similar to those of Mr. 
Menafee and the Mobile brick-mason. These repre- 
sent a class of students who have absorbed the spirit 
of the school as well as its methods, and who are 
doing far-reaching service, although they are not 
enrolled on our list of graduates. We have tried to 
give special attention to all forms of agricultural 
training at Tuskegee, because we believe that the 
Negro, Hke any other race in a similar stage of 
development, is better off when owning and culti- 
vating the soil. 

As I have explained elsewhere, the results of 
our agricultural work in the past have not been 
as manifest as they will be in the future, for 
the Institute has been compelled to give fore- 
most place to the building trades in order to get 
under shelter. The task of erecting nearly seventy 
buildings, in which to house about seventeen hun- 
dred people, has not been easy And yet what are 
some of the results of our lessons in farming ? Not 



2o6 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

long ago I drove through a section of Macon County, 
Alabama. My drive extended a distance of per- 
haps eight miles, and during this time I passed 
through or near the farms of A. H. Adams, Thomas 
Courrier, Frank McCay, Nathaniel Harris, Thomas 
Anderson, John Smith, and Dennis Upshaw. These 
seven men had attended the Tuskegee Institute for 
longer or shorter periods, and each had already paid 
for his farm or was buying it. All of these men had 
studied in the Phelps Hall Bible Training School in 
the morning, and had taken the agricultural course 
in the afternoon. When I visited their farms, I saw 
them actually at work, and it was most encouraging 
and interesting to note the air of cleanliness and 
system about their farms and homes. In every 
case they were not confining themselves to the rais- 
ing of cotton, but had learned to diversify their crops. 
All were active in church and Sunday-school work, 
and were using their influence to get others to buy 
homes. The most prosperous farmer among them, 
was Mr. Upshaw. He began farming with prac- 
tically nothing. At present he owns one hundred 
and fifteen acres of land, which is cultivated by him- 
self and family. On this land is a neat, attractive 
house, a barn and outbuildings, and a small sugar 
house for boiling syrup from the cane which he raises 
for his own use. His home and farm are models for 
other farmers. He raises not only cotton, but corn 
and oats, vegetables, fruit, live stock, and fowls. 



SO]\IE TANGIBLE RESULTS 207 

He has an unusually fine peach orchard. Mr. and 
Mrs. Upshaw are leaders in the County Farmers' 
Institute. Mrs. Upshaw is also a member of the 
Mothers' Meeting, which assembles regularly in the 
town of Tuskcgee. While Mr. Upshaw's present 
house is better than the average fai*mhouse in that 
section, when I last visited this farm, I found lum- 
ber on the ground to be used in erecting a new and 
larger house. Hundreds of such examples could 
be cited. 

I have given these seven examples because people 
who know absolutely nothing about the subject 
often make the statement that when a Negro gets 
any degree of education he will not work — especially 
as a farmer. As a rule, people who make these 
sweeping assertions against the Negro are blinded 
by prejudice. The judgment of any man, black or 
white, who is controlled by race prejudice is not to 
be trusted. With one exception, I did not know 
of the farming operations of these men before the 
drive referred to; but I was not at all surprised at 
what I saw, because my years of experience have 
brought me into unbroken contact with Tuskegee 
men and women all over the South, and wherever I 
have met them I have found that they had in some 
degree raised the level of life about them. 

Another branch of Agriculture, to which we have 
for a number of years given special attention, is 
dairying. The demand from Southern white people 



2o8 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

for trained dairymen is much greater than we have 
been able to supply. 

In 1898, L. A. Smith finished the course of train- 
ing" in dairying and in the academic branches. He 
had been able to complete his course only by working 
during the day and attending school at night during 
the greater part of his time here. Soon after Smith 
graduated, we had a call for a well-trained dairyman 
from the Forest City Creamery Company, Rockford, 
Illinois. Smith was recommended. He has .been 
holding an important position in the creamery for 
five years, and has several times been promoted with 
an increase of salary. Smith has paid for a neat 
and comfortable home, and he has the confidence 
and respect of the entire community. He looked 
so young and inexperienced in taking up his work 
that his ability was doubted, but it did not take him 
long to prove that he was fully equal to the occasion. 
TIt^ proprietor unhesitatingly said that he was one 
of the most proficient and valuable men in his 
employ, and that he had placed him in a very impor- 
tant and tr^ang position — that of making butter 
cultures. This is a secret department in which no 
one except the employees operating it and the 
proprietor is permitted to enter. Mr. Smith also 
did some important chemical work in connection 
with a lawsuit supposed to involve the manufacture 
of spurious butter. 

In Montgomery County, Alabama, Mr. N. N. 



SOME TANGIBLE RESULTS 209 

Scott, a Southern white man, has operated for a 
number of years the largest and most successful 
dairy farm in his section. Mr. Scott has in his 
employ three Tuskegee men, with Scott Thomas in 
charge. Mr. Scott tells us that those men trained 
at our school are the most efficient helpers he can 
secure. He keeps a standing order with Mr. George 
W. Carver, our instructor in dairying, to the effect 
that he will employ any one that Mr. Carver recom- 
mends. Not far from Mr. Scott's dairy is a smaller 
one owned by Mr. E. J. Hughes, another white man. 
Some time ago Mr. Hughes secured Luther M. Jones, 
who had taken only a partial course in dairying at 
Tuskegee, to make butter and cheese for him. Such 
examples can be found in nearly every one of the 
Southern States. 

From the beginning, the work of this institution 
has been closely related to the public school system 
of the South, for it must be clear to all that in the 
last analysis we must depend upon public schools 
for the general education of the masses, and it is 
important that the larger institutions for the edu- 
cation of the Negro keep in close and sympathetic 
touch with the school officials of the Southern States. 

One way in which we assist the public school sys- 
tem of the South is by sending out men and women 
who become the teachers of teachers. One of the 
best examples of this is the case of Isaac Fisher, a 
young man who came to Tuskegee a number of years 



2IO WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

ago, and earned his board by working during the 
day and going to school at night. Two years ago 
Mr. Fisher, upon my recommendation, was elected 
by the State officials of the State of Arkansas to the 
important position of Principal of the Branch Nor- 
mal College of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, the main insti- 
tution for training coloured teachers for the public 
schools of that commonwealth. Mr. Fisher has 
associated with him a large force of teachers, two of 
whom also are Tuskegee graduates. In the school 
are students many of whom will become not only 
public-school teachers in the usual sense, but having 
been trained by Mr. Fisher in the industries, they 
will be able to introduce them gradually into their 
teaching. There is hardly a single Southern State 
where our men and women are not found in some of 
the larger schools for training teachers. 

Our students at Tuskegee are instructed con- 
stantly in methods of building schoolhouses and 
prolonging the school term. It is safe to say that 
outside the larger Southern cities and towns in the 
rural district, one will find nine-tenths of the school 
buildings wholly unfit for use, and rarely is the pub- 
lic school session longer than five months — in most 
cases not more than four. These conditions exist 
largely because of the poverty of the States. One 
of the problems of our teachers is to show the people 
how through private effort they can build school- 
houses and extend the school term. ^m 

1 



SOME TANGIBLE RESULTS 211 

Milton Calloway left Tuskegee three years ago. 
In addition to taking the normal course, he learned 
the trade of tinsmithing. When he returned to his 
home at Union Spring, Bullock County, Alabama, 
he secured a school some distance in the country. 
The term was so short that Calloway found he could 
not live all the year by teaching during the three or 
four months of the session. Calloway's trade came 
to his rescue. Soon after he began teaching, he made 
an arrangement with a white man in the town by 
which he was to work in his shop on Saturdays and 
during his vacation months. By following this plan, 
the school is graduall)'- being built up, the people are 
being taught to save their money, improve the school- 
house, prolong the school term, and buy homes. 

Moses P. Simmons, another one of our graduates 
in an adjoining county, has lengthened the term of 
the public school by teaching the children how to 
grow vegetables, which have been disposed of for 
school purposes. 

During the latest session of our Negro Conference 
in February, one delegate from Conecuh County, 
Alabama, told how his people had nearly doubled the 
length of the school term by each family's agreeing 
to plant an extra half-acre which was designated 
as the "school half-acre." A number of Tuskegee 
men and women have put on foot some such scheme 
as this. 

I asked one of the officials of the Tuskegee Insti- 



212 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

tute to canvass our nearest large city, Montgomery, 
Alabama, in order to obtain the name of every stu- 
dent there who had received a diploma or certificate 
from Tuskegee, or who had remained long enough to 
be in any degree influenced by its teaching, and to 
report to me exactly what he found after making a 
personal inspection. Here are a few of his reports: 

"Perry, J. W., class of 1889, lives near the city. 
Is farming. He controls 150 acres, owns five head 
of cattle, and teaches school six months in the year. 

" Davis, Joseph, who has been away from Tus- 
kegee three years, I found at w^ork on a four-story 
building in process of erection on Commerce Street. 
He was getting $2.50 a day. At work on the same 
job were William Fuller at $3.60 a day, and H. T. 
Wheat at $2.50. Last summer Fuller received $4 
a day for four months, at Troy, Alabama. 

" ]\Ioten, Pierce, is at work as drug clerk in the 
drug store of D. A. C. Dungee, at the corner of Court 
and Washington Streets. He graduated from Tus- 
kegee in 1902. While at the school he worked in 
the hospital, and much of that time had charge of 
the drug room. He is studying medicine, and has 
already spent a session at Meharry Medical College, 
Nashville, Tennessee. 

"Campbell, Mrs. Berry N. (Miss Bowen), gradu- 
ated in the class of 1887, and her home has been in 
Montgomery most of the time since then, although 
her work at times takes her away from the city. She 



I 



SOME TANGIBLE RESULTS 213 

is a trained nurse of excellent reputation and wide 
experience, and has frequently been employed at 
Hale's Infirmar}^ When I inquired for her she was 
taking care of a private case. She owns two good 
houses on Union Street and on High Street, both of 
which I saw. She also owns a vacant lot." 

There were only three whose records were found 
to be uncertain or unsatisfactory. The same kind 
of investigation will reveal almost similar conditions 
existing in a greater or less degree in other Southern 
cities. 

Now let me show their life in smaller towns : one 
containing between four and five thousand inhabi- 
tants. Some time ago I\Ir. Bedford, one of our 
trustees, made a personal investigation in Eufaula, 
Alabama. I quote directly from Mr. Bedford as to 
what he found: 

"Sydney Murphy graduated in 1887. He went 
at once to Eufaula. For three years he taught 
and farmed in the country. He was then made 
principal of the coloured public schools of the city. 
He still holds this position, and is now serving his 
thirteenth year. He has a nice home in the city, 
three houses that he rents, and some vacant lots. 

"John Jordan, 1901, a graduate in harness- 
making, opened a shop in Eufaula, September, 1901. 
He reached Eufaula with Si 6 and a very few tools. 
He paid $7 license, $3.50 in advance for a month's 
rent, and had $5.50 for board and other expenses. 



214 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

He curtained off a little space in his shop for a bed- 
room, and with an oilstove cooked his own meals. 
In this way he saved up $50, but lost it in the failure 
of the bank of Eufaula. He has gone right on with 
his business, and now has one of the best shops in 
the city. He has established the People's Library, 
which has more than 600 volumes in it. He has a 
reading-room and literary society over which he 
presides, and is superintendent of the A. M. E. 
Sunday-school. ' ' 

After several years at the school, during which 
they worked upon the school farm, Frank and 
Dow^ L. Reid left Tuskegee at the completion of 
the B Middle Class. Frank, the older brother, left 
in the year 1888, and Dow in the year 1891. Before 
coming to Tuskegee, these young men had lived 
upon a rented farm with their father, but on re- 
turning home they decided to buy a farm of their 
own. They entered into an agreement to purchase 
a farm of 320 acres, four miles from the old home- 
stead, and with little or no money, but with a 
determination to succeed, they began to cultivate 
the land. They agreed to pay $5.50 per acre for 
the place, and, regardless of the fact that they had 
little money at the time, they bought the farm, 
paying in a few years the whole amount, $1,760. 
In addition to this farm, the Reid brothers, as they 
are styled for miles around, have bought another 
farm of 225 acres at $10 per acre. This farm is 



SOME TANGIBLE RESULTS 215 

about two miles away from the place first mentioned. 
When the final payment upon this last purchase is 
made in the fall, after crops have been gathered 
and marketed, a total of $4,010 will have been 
made and expended for land by these young men 
since the younger one left Tuskegcc some twelve 
years ago. 

The stock and farming implements on these 
farms are far superior to those seen upon most of 
the plantations. On the farm of 320 acres are 
seventeen fine horses and mules, all large and in 
good condition; there are thirty well-bred cows and 
fifty fine, healthy looking hogs, besides a large 
number of chickens and guineas, which furnish 
plenty of eggs for the families' use. The farming 
implements, including plows, mowers, rakes, harrows, 
etc., are of the latest patterns. The four double 
wagons, the single top-buggy, the road wagon and 
go-cart are all in good order, and are kept under 
cover when not in use. We often find farmers in 
the South who, when the crop is made, leave the 
plows, the mower, the rake, in fact, all the farming 
implements, standing out in the field, exposed to 
wind and weather all through the winter months. 
A visitor to the Reid brothers' plantation will find 
that each piece of machinery on this plantation has 
a place under a shed built for the purpose, and is 
kept there when not in use. 

There are eight dwelling-houses — a four-room 



2i6 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

frame building in which the young men and their 
families live, and seven log cabins in which the 
farmhands live with their families. The first is 
rather old and uncomely in appearance from the 
outside, but the interior is more pleasing. The bed- 
rooms are large and clean, with sufficient windows 
and doors to permit of necessary ventilation during 
the sleeping hours. The dining-room is well kept, 
and the whole interior of the house presents a neat, 
clean and attractive appearance. This house is 
to be replaced by a larger one, to be built during 
the winter. 

A large cotton-gin, with an eighty-tooth saw, is 
owned and operated by these young men. Last 
year, besides ginning the 125 bales of cotton raised 
upon their own plantation, they ginned the cotton 
raised by nearly all the other farmers in the neigh- 
bourhood. 

The post-office at Dawkins was formerly about 
four miles from its present location, but since the 
Reid brothers settled there and the community 
grew so rapidly the post-office was removed to their 
place, and the plantation was named Dawkins. The 
post-office is located in the general merchandise 
store of the Reids, and Mr. Frank Reid is post- 
master. There was neither a church nor a school- 
house in the community when these young men 
went to Dawkins. They purchased four acres of 
land nearby, and not only gave this land, but assisted 



SOME TANGIBLE RESULTS 217 

in building a comfortable church, which has been 
used both as a church and a schoolhouse. Preaching 
services are held regularly in the church, and a 
flourishing school is taught from seven to nine 
months each year. Last year more than one hundred 
boys and girls were registered. 

Mr. J. N. Calloway, who graduated from the 
Tuskegee Institute in 1892, is principal of the school, 
and has one assistant teacher. A new two-room 
schoolhouse is now being built through the efforts 
of Mr. Calloway, and will be completed at the time 
of the opening of the school the latter part of next 
October. 

I am often asked to what extent we are able to 
supply domestic servants directly from this insti- 
tution. I always answer, " Not to any large extent, 
notwithstanding the fact that women are trained 
here in everything relating to work in the home." 
When a woman finishes one of our courses, she is in 
demand at once at a salary three or four times as 
large as that paid in the average home. Aside from 
this, we arc doing a larger service by sending out 
over a large extent of territory strong leaders who 
will go into local communities and teach the lessons 
of home-making than we could by trying to send a 
cook directly into each family who applies to us. 
The latter would be a never-ending process. Miss 
Annie Canty, for example, teaches cooking and other 
industries in the public schools of Columbus, Georgia. 



2i8 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

There is a little leaven that we hope will gradually 
help leaven the whole lump. Largely through the 
influence of our graduates, cooking and other indus- 
tries are being taught in many of the public schools 
of the South. Another young wom^an, Miss Mary 
L. ;McCrary, is doing the same thing in the Industrial 
College for coloured people in Oklahoma. 

Not a few of our men have become merchants, 
and they are generally patronised by both races and 
have high commercial rating. Two of the best 
examples of this class are Mr. A. J. Wilbom, who is 
a successful merchant in the town of Tuskegee, and 
Mr. A. J. Wood, of Benton, Alabama. 

Last January, w^hen in Los Angeles, California, I 
met by chance a young man who had taken a partial 
course in our nurse-training department. I asked 
him if he were reflecting credit upon the Tuskegee 
Institute ? Without a word, he pulled out a bank- 
book and asked me to inspect it. I found a sub- 
stantial sum recorded to his credit. Before I was 
through with the inspection of the first bank-book, 
he handed me a second which showed an amount to 
his credit at another bank. I found that Mrs. Barre, 
another of our graduates, is one of the leading trained 
niurscs of the same city. 



CHAPTER XVIII 
Spreading the Tuskegee Spirit 

One of the questions most frequently asked me 
is, To what extent are Tuskegee graduates able to 
reproduce the work of the parent institution ? Just 
as the Tuskegee Institute is an outgrowth of the 
Hampton Institute, so other smaller schools have 
grown out of the Tuskegee Institute in various 
parts of the country. There are at present sixteen 
schools of some size which have grown out of the 
Tuskegee Institute or have been organised by Tus- 
kegee men and women. In all instances, these 
schools have become large enough to be chartered 
under the laws of the State. 

The Vorhces Industrial School at Denmark, South 
Carolina, for example, was founded by Elizabeth 
E. Wright, class of 1894. It is now in its seventh 
year. Miss Wright was greatly opposed at first by 
both the white and coloured people, but she per- 
severed, and has at length overcome all opposition. 
She has 300 acres of land, all paid for. A large central 
building has been erected at a cost of $3,000. This 
contains offices, class rooms, and a chapel that will 
seat 600. This building is paid for, and a girls' dor- 

219 



2 20 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

mitory, to cost $4,000, the money for which is in 
the treasury, is in process of erection. The plans 
for both of these buildings were drawn b}^ a Tus- 
kegee student. A bam to cost $800 is nearly com- 
pleted, and there are several other small buildings. 
Miss Wright is assisted by three Tuskegee graduates, 
one as the farm superintendent, one as treasurer and 
bookkeeper, and the other as carpenter and teacher 
of drawing. The day and boarding students num- 
ber more than 300. Farming in its various branches 
is the principal work of the students, but they are 
also taught shoemaking, carpentry, cooking, sewing, 
housekeeping, and laundering, while printing and 
blacksmithing are soon to be added to the course. 
The school spent $9,000 last year in current expenses, 
building expenses, and the purchase of land. 

Another of our graduates, Mr. V. Chambliss, has 
charge of the farming operations of the Southern 
Land Improvement Company. About forty Negro 
families have settled upon land controlled by this 
organisation, and the number is increasing each year. 
These families are being given the opportunity to buy 
their homes through their own labour and under the 
guidance of Mr. Chambliss. Mr. ChambHss does 
not use the hoe himself, for he finds it more econo- 
mical to utilise his time directing the work. When 
the world wants cotton or corn, it cares little whether 
the man uses his pen or his hoe. What it desires are 
results. Some men have the ability to produce fifty 



SPREADING THE TUSKEGEE SPIRIT 221 

times as much cotton with the pen as with the hoe. 
Another example will show how our students succeed 
when working directly under others. The letter 
which follows is to the point: 



Professor Booker T. Washington. 

Dear Sir: The students from your school who have been at 
work here during the vacation expect to return to Tuskegee 
to-morrow, and we want to say to you that these boys have 
demonstrated to our company the wonderful benefit of your 
teaching. These young men have taken hold of their work in 
a stead}' and businesslike way, and have worked uncomplain- 
ingly during the severe heat of the past summer. We would 
like, if it is possible, to induce a number of your students to pur- 
chase their homes about our works in North Birmingham and 
become regular workmen in our different shops. We have a 
letter before us now, written by one of your students, John 
Davis, which would reflect credit on the masters of Yale or 
Harvard. Please accept our best wishes for the success of the 
grand work you have undertaken. 

DiMMicK Pipe Works Company, 

Birmingham, Alabama. 



A conspicuous example of a Tuskegee graduate 
who is using his knowledge of stock-raising in a prac- 
tical way is that 01" William Johnson Shoals, of Clear 
Creek, Indian Territory. Shoals owns and operates 
his own stock farm, one of the largest in the Terri- 
tory, and has been successful from the very begin- 
ning. 

The following letter indicates one of the ways in 
which we are able to assist the public-school system 
from time to time : 



222 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

Ethelville, Alabama, June, 1903. 
Professor B. T. Washington. 

I am very anxious to afford the coloured teachers of this coun- 
ty the best instruction possible, and so I write to ask if you 
cannot send us one of your teachers to conduct a Normal Insti- 
tute, to be held at CarroUton, June 29th to July 4th — a teacher 
whom you can recommend. I am sorry to say the county has 
no money it can spend on this matter. 

Yours truly, 

W. H. Storey, 
County Superintendent of Education. 

The following institutions have grown out of the 
Tuskegee Institute and have been chartered under 
the laws of their respective States. Not only have 
they been founded by Tuskegee graduates, but the 
officers and in many cases the entire faculty are 
from Tuskegee : 

Mt. Meigs Institute, Waugh, Alabama ; Snow Hill 
Institute, Snow Hill, Alabama; Vorhees Industrial 
School, Denmark, South Carolina; East Tennessee 
Normal and Industrial Institute, Harriman, Ten- 
nessee; Robert Hungerford Industrial Institute, 
Eatonville, Florida ; Topeka Educational and Indus- 
trial Institute, Topeka, Kansas ; Allengreene Normal 
and Industrial Institute, Ruston, Louisiana; Utica 
Normal and Industrial Institute, Mississippi; Chris- 
tianburg Institute, Cambria, Virginia. 

The story of struggle, sacrifice and hard work 
connected with the founding of some of these schools 
is more akin to romance than to reality. 

Snow Hill Institute, Snow Hill, Alabama, by w^ay 



SPREADING THE TUSKEGEE SPIRIT 223 

of illustration, was founded by William J. Edwards, 
of the class of 1893. This school is now in its tenth 
year, and was started in a one-room cabin. Soon 
after the school was established, Honourable R. O. 
Simpson, a wealthy white resident of the community, 
was so impressed with its good effect upon the 
Negroes of the vicinity that he gave the school forty 
acres of land. This has been added to, until the 
school now owns 160 acres, and property to the 
value of $30,000. 

Last year it expended $20,000 in its operations. 
It has about 400 students, 200 of them being board- 
ing students. The following trades are taught: 
Farming, carpentry, wheelwrighting, blacksmithing, 
painting, brickmaking, printing, sewing, cooking^ 
housekeeping. About twenty teachers and instruc- 
tors are employed, nearly all graduates or former stu- 
dents of Tuskegee. Snow Hill has sent out twenty- 
five graduates. All are required to pass the State 
teachers' examination before graduating. Six of 
them are teachers in the Institute. The school not 
only has the support and the sympathy of Mr. R. O. 
Simpson, but of all the best white people in the 
county. 

A little more than a year ago one of our graduates, 
Mr. Charles P. Adams, cstabHshed a small school at 
Ruston, Louisiana. At present the school owns 
twenty-five acres of land, on which a schoolhouse 
costing $1,200 has been built and paid for. The school 



224 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

term has been extended from three to eight months, 
with three teachers — all Tuskegee graduates — and 
I lo pupils. In connection with the class-room work 
the students are taught agriculture and housekeep- 
ing. All this has been done in a little more than one 
year with money and labour contributed by the peo- 
ple of both races in the commimity. In regard to 
Mr. Adams's work, Honourable B. F. Thompson, the 
Mayor of Ruston, says, " Professor Adams deserves 
credit for what he has accomplished." Honourable 
S. D. Pearce, the representative of the parish in the 
State Legislature, says, "The school is doing fine 
work for the education of the coloured youth of this 
section of the State, and Professor Adams is making 
a vigorous struggle for its advancement. ' ' Mr. W. E. 
Redwine, Superintendent of Public Instruction for 
the parish, says, "Professor Adams is doing work 
in the right direction for the betterment of his race." 
Mr. A. J. Bell, the editor of the local newspaper, 
says, " His work in this section has been productive 
of incalculable good." 

As to the work of the Utica Normal and Industrial 
Institute, Utica, Mississippi, I will let Mr. W. H. 
Holtzclaw, the principal, tell in his own words: 

" I came here from Snow Hill, Alabama, last Octo- 
ber, without a cent (I left my wife behind because of 
lack of means to bring her, and I walked part of the 
way through a wild and unfrequented part of this 
State), and started this work under a tree. Now 




Q 

z 

-73 



■Si 
•Ji 
< 

O 

6 
z 



SPREADING THE TUSKEGEE SPIRIT 225 

we have two horses, forty acres of land, one cow and 
a calf, a farm planted and growing, more than 200 
students, seven teachers, and a building going up. 
In aU my efforts I have had the wise counsel and 
constant assistance of Mrs. Holtzclaw, without 
which I could not have made much progress." 

Harriman Industrial Institute, Harriman, Ten- 
nessee, was established five years ago by J. W. Ovel- 
trea, of the class of 1893. The school has thirty 
acres of land in the suburbs of Harriman. Mr. 
Oveltrea and his wife are both graduates of Tus- 
kegee, and they have been aided in their work by 
Tuskegee graduates and students. The school has 
four buildings and about one hundred students. 
Several trades are taught. 

The Robert Hungerford Institute, in Eatonville, 
Florida, was founded by R. C. Calhoun, of the 
class of 1896. Eatonville is about six miles from 
Orlando. Mr. Calhoun had nothing to begin with 
but the little public school. He has secured 200 
acres of land, clear of debt, and a year ago dedicated 
Booker T. Washington Hall, a dormitory and class- 
room building, with chapel. This building, the 
plans of which were drawn by a Tuskegee graduate, 
cost $3,000. The trades taught are farming, wheel- 
wrighting, painting, carpentry, sewing, cooking and 
laundering. 

Miss Nathalie Lord, one of my early teachers at 
Hampton, is a trustee of this school. The school is 



2 26 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

now in its fourth year. It has forty boarding stu- 
dents and nearly one hundred day students. Mrs, 
Calhoun, who is her husband's assistant, was a 
student at Tuskegee, as was also the man who has 
charge of the blacksmith and wheelwright shops. 

Nearly three years ago, three of our graduates, 
under the leadership of one of our teachers, Mr. J. N. 
Calloway, went to Africa under the auspices of the 
German government, to introduce cotton - raising 
among the natives. At the end of the second year 
the German officials were so pleased that they 
employed three other students. At the end of the 
fourth year the experiment was successful to the 
extent that a hundred bales of cotton have been 
shipped from the colony of Togo, Africa, to Berlin. 
Only a few months ago the German officials were 
kind enough to send me several pairs of hose made 
from cotton raised by our students. 

Since beginning this experiment, we have received 
applications from both English and Belgian cotton- 
raising companies that wish to secure Tuskegee men 
to introduce cotton-raising in their African pos- 
sessions. The Porto Rican Government makes an 
annual appropriation for the purpose of maintain- 
ing eighteen students at Tuskegee in order that they 
may learn our methods. The Haytian Government 
has recently arranged to send a number of young 
men here, mainly with the view of their being trained 
in farming. Besides, we have students present from 



SPREADING THE TUSKEGEE SPIRIT 227 

the West Indies, Africa, and several South American 
countries. 

While speaking of the Tuskegee missionary spirit, 
it is interesting to note the effect that the industrial 
training given by our graduates has had upon the 
morals and manner of living among the natives of 
Africa in Togoland. Missionaries have been work- 
ing among these people for many years, and very 
effectively, and yet training in carpentry and cotton- 
raising had results that the academic and religious 
teaching had not accomplished. When the natives 
are taught the Bible, and the heart and the head 
are educated, the tendency is for them to become 
teachers or traders. In the latter case, their learn- 
ing brings them too frequently into contact with 
unscrupulous European traders from whom they 
acquire habits of gambling, cheating, drinking, etc. 
In addition to this, when they begin merchandising, 
the natives find that it is to their advantage to have 
more than one wife, since their wives are able to 
help them in selling in the markets and through the 
country districts. The young people who went to 
Africa from Tuskegee found that this problem 
greatly perplexed the missionaries, but wherever 
these natives were given work on the plantations, 
and employed their muscles as well as their brains, 
a change for the better was soon apparent. 

It is usually true that when a native is kept 
employed in one place, he will begin to build a home. 



228 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

consisting of a number of huts ; he will clear a farm 
or plantation, and stock it with cattle, sheep, pigs 
and fowls. He will plant vegetables, corn, cassava, 
yams, etc. This happened among the Africans who 
were employed on the plantations cultivated by our 
graduates. The wives and children of these labour- 
ers were given work on the farms, and it has been 
found that few of them gamble, steal and cheat, as 
do those who wander to and fro without employ- 
ment. Such natives as these cotton-growers are 
more easily reached by missionary effort, and when 
they are converted to the Christian religion, if they 
remain on the farms, they seldom fall back into 
paganism. 

I have been informed that it is a general opinion 
among the missionaries in Togoland that industrial 
education will be a main-stay in future effort, and 
that such teaching will be introduced in the mission- 
ary institutions as rapidly as possible. Since the 
young men went out from Tuskegee, a decided 
change has been noticed in the sanitation and mode 
of living in the towns near which they are located. 
Much of this betterment has been the direct result 
of the lessons learned by the natives from seeing our 
carpenter build houses, and observing our graduates' 
habits of life. The natives seemed anxious to learn, 
and the Tuskegee colony received many applications 
from the women to have their daughters come and 
live with the American women in order that they 



SPREADING THE TUSKEGEE SPIRIT 229 

might learn the new customs, especially the art of 
sewing, cooking, and doing housework. 

Few of the huts had shutters or doors when our 
graduates first went to the colony — bedsteads were 
unknown ; but now many of the huts have outside 
shutters, and their inmates have learned how to 
construct comfortable beds for themselves. Many 
who formerly bathed in streams now have bath- 
houses back of their huts. On Sunday, all work on 
the plantations of the Tuskegee party was sus- 
pended, except caring for the stock and other neces- 
sary duties, and this, too, had its effect on the 
natives, who were inclined to accept our religious 
observance of the day. Many now dress in holiday 
attire on Sunday, and go to the nearest mission. 

The Tuskegee party settled about sixty miles 
from the coast, where no wagons or carts were used 
for conveying produce or material. The native men 
and women carried all freight in sixty-pound loads 
on their heads, and were able to travel fifteen to 
twenty miles a day. On these round trips of ten 
days, the women carried their small children with 
them, and during their frequent halts came into con- 
tact with the rough and demoralising element of the 
trading-post, and with other degrading influences. 
This mode of transportation seemed very unsatis- 
factory to the Tuskegee young men, who introduced 
carts and wagons drawn by men. This allowed the 
women and children to remain at home and look 



230 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

after the farms and their household duties, while the 
men made the trips to the coast. 

Young girls, just growing into womanhood, are 
no longer compelled to meet the many bad influences 
formerly encountered on the trips to the coast. The 
use of farm machinery in the colony has relieved the 
women and girls of much drudgery. They used to 
prepare the land with the crudest hoes and plows. 
This is now done with improved American imple- 
ments. The Germans have been so strongly im- 
pressed with these effects of industrial training upon 
the natives, that they have decided to introduce into 
all the schools of that colony a system for the train- 
ing of boys in hand work. With the assistance of the 
chiefs, improved methods of agriculture and handi- 
craft will be spread among the tribes of that region. 

I do not wish my readers to get the impression 
that all of Tuskegee's men and w^omen have suc- 
ceeded, because they have not. A few have failed 
miserably, much to our regret, but the percentage 
of failures is so small that they are more than over- 
shadowed by those who have been, in the fullest 
sense of the word, successful. 

Despite all that I have said, the work has merely 
begun. I believe we have found the way. Our 
endeavour will be to continue to pursue it faithfully, 
actively, bravely, honestly. With sufficient means, 
such work as I have indicated could be greatly 
increased. 



CHAPTER XIX 

Negro Education Not a Failure 

Several persons holding high official position 
have said recently that it does not pay, from any 
point of view, to educate the Negro; and that all 
attempts at his education have so far failed to accom- 
plish any good results. The Southern States, which 
out of their poverty are contributing rather liberally 
for the education of all the people, as does indi- 
vidual and organised philanthropy throughout the 
country, have a right to know whether the Negro 
is responding to the efforts they have made to place 
him upon a higher plane of civilisation. 

Will it pay to invest further money in this direc- 
tion? In seeking to answer this question, it is 
hardly fair to compare the progress of the American 
Negro with that of the American white man, who, in 
some unexplained way, got thousand of years ahead 
of the Negro in the arts and sciences of civilisation. 
But to get at the real facts and the real capability 
of the black man, compare for a moment the Amer- 
ican Negro with the Negro in Africa, or the black 
man with the black man. In South Africa alone 
there are five million black people who have never 

231 



232 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

been brought, through school or other agencies, into 
contact with a higher civilisation in a way to have 
their minds or their ambitions strengthened or 
awakened. As a result, the industries of South 
Africa languish and refuse to prosper for lack of 
labour. The native black man refuses to labour 
because he has been neglected. He has few wants 
and little ambition, and these can be satisfied by- 
labouring one or two days out of the seven. In the 
southern part of the United States there are more 
than eight millions of my race who, both by contact 
with the whites and by education in the home, in 
school, in church, have had their minds awakened 
and strengthened— have thus had their wants 
increased and multiplied many times. Hence, 
instead of a people in idleness, we have in the South 
a people who are anxious to work because they want 
education for their children; they want land and 
houses, and churches, books, and papers. In a 
word, they want the highest and best in our civilisa- 
tion. Looked at, then, from the most material and 
selfish point of view, it has paid to awaken the 
Negro's mind, and there should be no hmit placed 
upon the development of that mind. 

Does the American Negro take advantage of oppor- 
tunities to secure education ? Practically no school- 
house has been opened for the Negro since the war 
that has not been filled. Often hungry and in rags, 
making heroic sacrifices, the Negro youth has been 



NEGRO EDUCATION NOT A FAILURE 233 

determined to annihilate his mental darkness. With 
all his disadvantages, the Negro, according to 
official records, has blotted out 55.5 per cent, of his 
ilhteracy since he became a free man, while practi- 
cally 95 per cent, of the native Africans are illiterate. 
After years of civilisation and opportunity, in Spain, 
68 per cent, of the population are illiterate ; in Italy, 
38 per cent. In the average South American coun- 
try about 80 per cent, are illiterate, while after forty 
years the American Negro has only 44.5 per cent, of 
illiteracy to his debit. I have thus compared the 
progress of my race, not with the highest civilised 
nations, for the reason that, in passing judgment 
upon us, the world too often forgets that, either 
consciously or otherwise, because of geographical or 
physical proximity to the American white man, we 
are being compared with the very highest civilisation 
that exists. But when compared with the most 
advanced and enlightened white people of the South, 
we find 12 per cent, of illiteracy for them and only 
44 per cent, for our race. 

Having seen that the American Negro takes 
advantage of every opportunity to secure an educa- 
tion, I think it will surprise some to learn to what 
an extent the race contributes toward its own edu- 
cation and works in sympathetic touch with the 
whites at the South. In emphasising this fact, I use 
the testimony of the best Southern white men. 
Says the State Superintendent of Education of Flor- 



234 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

ida in one of his recent official reports : " The follow- 
ing figures are given to show that the education of 
the Negroes of Middle Florida (the Black Belt of 
Florida) does not cost the white people of that sec- 
tion one cent." In those eight Black Belt counties, 
the total cost of the Negro schools is $19,457. The 
total contributed by the Negro in direct and indirect 
taxes amounted to $23,984, thus leaving a difference 
of $4,527, which, according to the Superintendent, 
went into the white schools. In Mississippi, for the 
year ending in 1899, according to an eminent author- 
ity, the Negroes had expended on their schools about 
20 per cent, of the total school fund, or a total of 
about $250,000. During the same year they paid 
toward their own education, in poll taxes. State, 
county and city taxes, and indirect taxes, about 
$280,000, or a surplus of about $30,000. So that, 
looked at from any point of view, it would seem that 
the Negroes in that State are in a large measure 
paying for their own education. 

But with all the Negro is doing for himself, with 
all the white people in the South are doing for them- 
selves, and despite all that one race is doing to help 
the other, the present opportunities for education are 
woefully inadequate for both races. In the year 
1877-78 the total expenditure for education in the 
ex-slave States was a beggarly $2.61 per capita for 
whites and only $1.09 for blacks; on the same basis 
the U. S. Commissioner of Education calculates that 




y 
u 






i 

2: 



72 



NEGRO EDUCATION NOT A FAILURE 235 

for the year 1900-01, $35,400,000 was spent for the 
education of both races in the South, of which 
$6,000,000 went to Negroes, or $4.92 per capita for 
whites and $2.21 for blacks. On the same basis, 
each child in Massachusetts costs the taxpayers for 
its education $22.35, ^^^ ^^'^^ ^^^ ^^"^ New York 
$20.53 yearly. 

From both a moral and religious point of view, 
what measure of education the Negro has received 
has been repaid, and there has been no step backward 
in any State. Not a single graduate of the Hamp- 
ton Institute or of the Tuskegee Institute can be 
found to-day in any jail or State penitentiary. After 
making careful inquiry, I cannot find a half-dozen 
cases of a man or woman who has completed a full 
course of education in any of our reputable institu- 
tions Hke Hampton, Tuskegee, Fisk or Atlanta, who 
are in prisons. The records of the South show that 
90 per cent, of the coloured people in prisons are 
without knowledge of trades, and 61 per cent, are 
illiterate. This statement alone disproves the asser- 
tion that the Negro grows in crime as education 
increases. If the Negro at the North is more 
criminal than his brother at the South, it is 
because of the employment which the South gives 
him and the North denies him. It is not the 
educated Negro who has been guilty of or even 
charged with crime in the South ; it is, as a rule, the 
one who has a mere smattering of education or is in 



236 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

total ignorance. While the Negro may succeed in 
getting into the State prison faster, the white man 
in some inexplainable manner has a way of getting 
out faster than the Negro. To illustrate: the 
official records of Virginia for a year show that one 
out of every three and one-half white men were freed 
from prison by executive clemency, and that only 
one out of every fourteen Negroes received such 
clemency. In Louisiana it is one to every four and 
one-half white men and one to every forty-nine 
Negroes. So that, when this feature is considered, 
matters are pretty well evened up between the races. 
As bearing further upon the tendency of education 
to improve the morals of the Negro and therefore to 
prolong his life, no one will accuse the average New 
York insurance company of being guided by mere 
sentiment toward the Negro in placing its risks; 
with the insurance company it is a question of cold 
business. A few months ago the chief medical 
examiner for the largest industrial insurance com- 
pany in America stated that, after twenty years' 
experience and observation, his company had found 
that the Negro who was intelHgent, who worked 
regularly at a trade or some industry and owned his 
home, was as safe an insurance risk as a white man 
in the same station of life. 

Not long ago, a Southern white man residing in the 
town of Tuskegee, who represents one of the largest 
and most wealthy accident and casualty companies 



NEGRO EDUCATION NOT A FAILURE 237 

in New York, wrote to his company to the effect that 
while he knew his company refused to insure the 
ordinary, ignorant coloured man, at the Tuskegee 
Institute there were some 150 officers and instructors 
who were persons of education and skill, with prop- 
erty and character, and that he, a Southern white 
man, advised that they be insured on the same 
terms as other races, and within a week the answer 
came back, " Insure without hesitation every Negro 
on the Tuskegee Institute grounds of the type you 
name." The fact is, that almost every insurance 
company is now seeking the business of the educated 
Negro. If education increased the risk, they would 
seek the ignorant Negro rather than the educated 
one. As bearing further upon the effect of education 
upon the morals of the Negro during the last forty 
years, let us go into the heart of the Black Belt of 
Mississippi and inquire of Alfred Holt Stone, a large 
and intelligent cotton planter, as to the progress of 
the race. Mr. Stone says: "The last census shows 
that the Negro constitutes 87.6 per cent, of the 
population of the Yazoo-Mississippi delta. Yet we 
hear of no black incubus ; we have had few midnight 
assassinations, and fewer lynchings. The violation 
by a Negro of the person of a white woman is with 
us an unknown crime ; nowhere else is the line mark- 
ing the social separation of the two races more 
rigidly drawn; nowhere are the relations between 
the two more kindly. With us, race riots are un- 



238 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

known, and we have but one Negro problem — 
though that constantly confronts us^ — how to secure 
more Negroes." 

There are few higher authorities on the progress 
of the Negro than Joel Chandler Harris, of the 
Atlanta Constitution. Mr. Harris had opportunity 
to know the Negro before the war, and he has fol- 
lowed his progress closely in freedom. In a state- 
ment published recently Mr. Harris says: 

" In spite of all, however, the condition of the 
Negro has been growing better 

"We cannot fairly judge a race, or a country, or a 
religious institution, or a social organisation, or 
society itself, nay, not the republic in which we take 
pride, unless we measure it by the standard set up 
by the men who are its best representatives. 

" We are in such a furious hurry. We are placed 
in a position of expecting a race but a few years from 
inevitable ignorance imposed on it by the conditions 
of slavery to make the most remarkable progress 
that the world has ever heard of, and when we dis- 
cover that in the nature of things this is impossible, 
we shake our heads sadly and are ready to lose heart 
and hope. 

"The point I desire to make is that the over- 
whelming majority of the Negroes in all parts of the 
South, especially in the agricultural regions, are 
leading sober and industrious lives. A temperate 
race is bound to be industrious, and the Negroes are 



NEGRO EDUCATION NOT A FAILURE 239 

temperate when compared with the whites. Even 
in the towns the majority of them are sober and. 
industrious. The idle and criminal classes among 
them make a great show in the police court records, 
but right here in Atlanta the respectable and decent 
Negroes far outnumber those who are on the lists 
of the police as old or new offenders. I am bound 
to conclude from what I see all about me, and from 
what I know of the race elsewhere, that the Negro, 
notwithstanding the late start he has made in civil- 
isation and enlightenment, is capable of making 
himself a useful member in the communities in 
which he lives and moves, and that he is becoming 
more and more desirous of conforming to all the laws 
that have been enacted for the protection of society." 
Some time ago I sent out letters to representative 
Southern men, covering each ex-slave state, asking 
them, judging by their observation in their own 
communities, what effect education had upon the 
Negro. To those questions I received 136 replies as 
follows : 

1. Has education made the Negro a more useful 
citizen ? 

Answers : Yes, 121; no, 4 ; unanswered, 1 1 . 

2. Has it made him more economical and more 
inclined to acquire wealth? 

Answers: Yes, 98; no, 14; unanswered, 24. 

3. Does it make him a more valuable workman, 
especially where skill and thought are required? 



240 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

Answers: Yes, 132; no, 2; unanswered, 2. 

4. Do well-trained, skilled Negro workmen find 
any difficulty in securing work in your community ? 

Answers: No, 117; yes, 4; unanswered, 15. 

5. Are coloured men in business patronised by the 
whites in your community ? 

Answers: Yes, 92; no, 9; unanswered, 35. (The 
large number of cases in which this question was not 
answered is due to scarcity of business men.) 

6. Is there any opposition to the coloured people's 
buying land in your community ? 

Answers: No, 128; yes, 3; unanswered, 5. 

7. Has education improved the morals of the 
black race? 

Answers: Yes, 97; no, 20; unanswered, 19. 

8. Has it made his religion less emotional and 
more practical? 

Answers: Yes, loi ; no, 16; unanswered, 19. 

9. Is it, as a rule, the ignorant or the educated 
who commit crime ? 

Answers : Ignorant, 115; educated, 3 ; unan- 
swered, 17. 

10. Does crime grow less as education increases 
among the coloured people ? 

Answers: Yes, 102; no, 19; unanswered, 15. 

1 1 . Is the moral growth of the Negro equal to his 
mental growth? 

Answers: Yes, 55; no, 46; unanswered, 35. 

But it has been said that the Negro proves eco- 



I 



NEGRO EDUCATION NOT A FAILURE 241 

nomically valueless in proportion as he is educated. 
All will agree that the Negro in Virginia, for example, 
began life forty years ago in complete poverty, 
scarcely owning clothing or a day's food. From an 
economic point of view, what has been accom- 
plished for Virginia alone largely through the exam- 
ple and work of the graduates of Hampton and other 
large schools in that state ? The reports of the State 
Auditor show that the Negro to-day owns at least 
one twenty-sixth of the total real estate in that com- 
monwealth exclusive of his holdings in towns and 
cities, and that in the counties east of the Blue 
Ridge Mountains he owns one-sixteenth. In Middle- 
sex County he owns one-sixth; in Hanover one- 
fourth. In Georgia, the official records show that, 
largely through the influence of educated men and 
women from Atlanta schools and others, the Negroes 
added last year $1,526,000 to their taxable property, 
making the total amount upon which they pay taxes 
in that State alone $16,700,000. From nothing to 
$16,000,000 in one State in forty years does not seem 
to prove that education is hurting the race. Rela- 
tive progress has been made in Alabama and other 
Southern States. Every man or woman who gradu- 
ates from the Hampton or Tuskegee Institutes, who 
has become intelHgent and skilled in any one of the 
industries of the South, is not only in demand at an 
increased salary on the part of my race, but there 
is equal demand from the white race. One of the 



242 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

largest manufacturing concerns in Birmingham, 
Alabama, keeps a standing order at the Tuskegee 
Institute to the effect that it will employ every man 
who graduates from our foundry department. 

When the South had a wholly ignorant and wholly 
slave Negro population, she produced about 4,000,000 
bales of cotton ; now she has a wholly free and partly 
educated Negro population, and the South produces 
nearly 10,000,000 bales of cotton, besides more food 
products than were ever grown in its history. It 
should not be overlooked that it is not the Negro 
alone who produces cotton, but it is his labour that 
produces most of it. And while he may pay a small 
direct tax, his labour makes it very convenient for 
others to pay direct taxes. 

Judged purely from an economic or industrial 
standpoint, the education of the Negro is paying, 
and will pay more largely in the future in proportion 
as educational opportunities are increased. A care- 
ful examination shows that, of the men and women 
trained at the Hampton and Tuskegee schools, not 
ten per cent, can be found in idleness at any season 
of the year. 

Years ago some one asked an eminent clergyman 
in Boston if Christianity is a failure. The Reverend 
doctor replied that it had never been tried. When 
people are bold enough to suggest that the education 
of the Negro is a failure, I reply that it has never been 
tried. The fact is that 44.5 per cent, of the colotu'ed 



NEGRO EDUCATION NOT A FAILURE 243 

people of this country to-day are illiterate. A very 
large proportion of those classed as educated have 
the merest smattering of knowledge, which means 
practically no education. Can the Negro child get 
an education in school four months and out of school 
eight months? Can the white child of the South 
who receives $4.92 per capita for education, or the 
black child who receives $2.21, be said to be given 
an equal chance in the battle of life, or has 
education been tried on them? The official 
records in Louisiana, for instance, show that less 
than one-fourth of the Negro children of school 
age attend any school during the year. This one- 
fourth was in school for a period of less than five 
months, and each Negro child of school age in 
the State had spent on him for education last year 
but $1.89, while each child of school age in the State 
of New York had spent on him $20.53. ^^'^ the for- 
mer slave States ninety per cent, of the Negro chil- 
dren of school age did not attend school for six 
months during the year 1900. 

Wherever the race is given an opportunity for 
education, it takes advantage of that opportunity, 
and the change can be seen in the improved material, 
educational, moral and religious condition of the 
masses. Contrast two townships, one in Louisiana, 
where the race has had little chance, with one in 
Farmville, Virginia, by means of the United States 
Bulletin of the Department of Labour. In the 



244 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

Louisiana township only lo per cent, attend school, 
and they attend for but four months in a year, and 
71 per cent, of the people are illiterate. And as a 
result of this ignorance and neglect, we find that only 
50 per cent, of the people living together as man 
and wife are legally married. Largely through the 
leadership of Hampton graduates, 56 per cent, of 
the black children in Farmville, Virginia, attend 
either public or private school from six to eight 
months. There is only 39 per cent, of illiteracy. 
Practically all the people living together as man and 
wife are legally married, and in the whole community 
only 15 per cent, of the births are illegitimate. 

But the vital point which I want to emphasise is 
the disposition of the Negro to exercise self-help in 
the building up of his own schools in connection with 
the State public school system. Wherever we send 
out from Tuskegee, or any of our Southern colleges, 
a Negro leader of proper character, he shows the 
people in most cases how to extend the school term 
beyond the few months provided for by the State. 
Out of their poverty the Southern States are making 
a tremendous effort to extend and improve the school 
term each year, but while this improvement is taking 
place, the Negro leaders of the character to which I 
have referred must be depended upon largely to 
keep alive the spark of education. 

It now seems settled that the great body of our 
people are to reside for all time in the Southern por- 



NEGRO EDUCATION NOT A FAILURE 245 

tion of the United States. Since this is true, there 
is no more helpful and patriotic service than to help 
cement a friendship between the two races that shall 
be manly, honourable, and permanent. In this 
work of moulding and guiding a public sentiment 
that shall forever maintain peace and good-will 
between the races on terms commendable to each, 
it is on the Negro who comes out of our universities, 
colleges, and industrial schools that we must largely 
depend. Few people realise how, under the most 
difficult and trying circumstances, during the last 
forty years, it has been the educated Negro who 
counselled patience and self-control and thus averted 
a war of races. Every Negro going out from our 
institutions properly educated becomes a link in 
the chain that shall forever bind the two races 
together in all the essentials of life. 

Finally, reduced to its last analysis, there are but 
two questions that constitute the problem of this 
country so far as the black and white races are con- 
cerned. The answer to the one rests with my peo- 
ple, the other with the white race. For my race, 
one of its dangers is that it may grow impatient and 
feel that it can get upon its feet by artificial and 
superficial efforts rather than by the slower but surer 
process which means one step at a time through all 
the constructive grades of industrial, mental, moral, 
and social development which all races have had to 
follow that have become independent and strong. 



246 WORKING WITH THE HANDS 

I would counsel : We must be sure that we shall make 
our greatest progress by keeping our feet on the 
earth, and by remembering that an inch of progress 
is worth a yard of complaint. For the white race, 
the danger is that in its prosperity and power it may 
forget the claims of a weaker people; may forget 
that a strong race, like an individual, should put its 
hand upon its heart and ask, if it were placed in sim- 
ilar circumstances, how it would like the world to 
treat it; that the stronger race may forget that, in 
proportion as it lifts up the poorest and weakest, even 
by a hair's breadth, it strengthens and ennobles 
itself. 

All the Negro race asks is that the door which 
rewards industry, thrift, intelligence, and character 
be left as wide open for him as for the foreigner who 
constantly comes to our country. ]\Iore than this, 
he has no right to request. Less than this, a 
Republic has no right to vouchsafe. 



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